


Unlike Heaven

by orphan_account



Category: AFI
Genre: Grey-A, Horror, M/M, Mental Illness, Mental Instability, Romance, San Francisco, Supernatural Elements, alternative universe, ghost story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-01
Updated: 2015-01-31
Packaged: 2018-03-09 22:27:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 37,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3266657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jade's a manic depressive recovering from a massive mental breakdown and trying to start over in a new city with a blank slate. Everything's seemingly looking up, until his new apartment begins displaying signs of a haunting, and his friends think Jade's spiraling into mental illness once again. However, the company of a ghost may be just the antidote Jade needs to combat his personality disorders.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this a long time ago, and forgot about it. Awhile ago I found the first couple passages of the beginning chapter, thought it had potential dusted it off, and had a field day. It's evolved into a totally different thing that what it began as, and the writing changes drastically halfway through, but I am very fond of the whole thing. 
> 
> I sort of think of it was my version of that stupid romantic comedy, "Just Like Heaven" I sat through only for the Cure related title. I was sorely disappointed, and decided to write my own haunted house love story. Now it's just one big sad rumination on falling in love.

Chapter 1 

“Well, what kind of apartment are you looking for?” Adam mused, tapping the heels of his hands against the dashboard in time with the gravelly radio tune blaring from Jade’s car stereo. Jade leaned his bony shoulder out of the open window and peered above his steering wheel, wing of flaxen hair blown from his eyes with the breeze, squinting in the wind. The air smelled like salt and city and engine grease; it was cool with ocean and the clear high rings of distant trolley carts. “A good apartment,” He mumbled, leaning into the gas pedal. “And quit drumming on the dash.” He added irritably without looking at Adam, who rolled his eyes and turned up the radio. “Jesus man, you need to get laid.” 

 

Jade turned the radio back down, slamming on the brakes suddenly as a spiteful light ahead of the flashed to a stubborn red. The 60’ T-Bird jolted to an ungraceful stop. “What I need is an affordable apartment, and a fucking new car.” He scoffed, turning to Adam, who was recovering from his sudden vault into the windshield. “You love Donna! Piece of shit.”   
“Stubborn old diseased whore? This bitch is the bane of my existence.” Jade patted the T-bird’s paint chipped side affectionately. “I hear you don’t even need a car in ‘Frisco.”  
Adam nodded, fiddling with the radio tuner. “Nobody owns a car because the rent is so damn high…please tell me why you decided to head off to the hardest to afford city in America when you have no money whatsoever? Or should I just blame it on your state of bankrupt depression and idiocy?”  
“Do I have to tell your sorry ass again?” Jade sighed, navigating around a tight corner and biting his lip.   
“Can you stop answering my questions with a question?”  
“Can you?” 

“Fine then, I’ll attribute the asshole-ness to your bankrupt depression and idiocy, too. You should really get that checked out.” Adam’s deft fingers turned the radio back up for the last time and his friend did not argue; he merely ignored it all together and continued to drive through the convoluted steep labyrinthine streets of residential San Francisco. Jade inhaled dramatically after a minute. He wad completely unable to stand silence, and even more than that he despised being ignored. “San Francisco because it was the only city that my dad didn’t have a push pin stuck into on his wall map. San Francisco because it’s untainted.” Jade finally said, rolling his eyes exaggeratedly until they landed on Adam, who was once again tapping his calloused hands on the rim of the open window, his hands rough and brown like two aged spiders, sagacious and careworn. “Ok, ok. But still. Wasn’t Bakersfield also unmarked? And Valencia?” Adam asked. “At least they’re affordable.” Jade made a violent scoffing sound, displaying a rather disgruntled look at Adam on his pretty face. “Bakersfield and Valencia are the armpits of Califonia. No wonder my dad didn’t want to visit there.” Adam nodded. “True dat.”

Jade’s father was a traveling salesman, the kind of clean cut man with an unmemorable handsomeness and a winning smile. He had tacked up a dusty bulletin board one evening when Jade was a kid, a huge map of California with all of it’s craggy mountains and hidden plains, blue rivers like veins and lakes like bruises. He put little clear pushpins into the cities that he had visited so his wife and children could trace his travels, hundreds of Californian insects creeping across the Golden state, butterflies with needles forever preserving them in flightless glory. He was the kind of man who could deal with thousands of doors slammed on his grinning face, the kind of man who lived with rejection well. Lived with rejection well until something snapped and he put a pistol in his mouth on the 99 freeway heading north to Fresno, crashing into the barrier at 2am, 50 miles or so over the speed limit. Jade had little recollection of his father being anything other than a smiling man in a photograph, a member someone else’s family, a friend maybe who showed up with a gift every once and a while when he came to visit. A selfish greedy bastard who took the easy road home, escaped his fleshy prison and left three kids to a young widow. He never traveled to San Francisco. Jade could be positive that no doorstep in San Francicso bared the bastard weight of his father, that no woman in this city had been a mistress, no boy or girl could possibly be his long lost brother, the result of some of his father’s wayward and freely offered sperm. San Francisco’s ornamented allure was a blank page. 

Contrary to Jade’s prior assumptions concerning the city, the houses were quaintly storybook like in appearance, all slanted and narrowly roofed, standing in crooked pastel lines like obedient schoolboys awaiting punishment. Jade turned into the tiny parking lot of a nearby diner and killed the tired engine. “I need some coffee.” He grumbled, fighting with the door. He raked his fingers through his unwashed hair, the incorrigible tawny brown that stuck up in a hundred different directions until it gave way into the manageable bleached shag that hid his eyes. He sagged exhaustedly against Donna’s hood, fumbling with his keys. Adam tentatively placed his heavy hand upon Jade’s shoulder, sensing the other man’s worn muscles tensing in erratic jerks.

“Tired?” He asked. The day was waning noticeably, city lights beginning to gaudily illuminate the secrets of night life in blinking green and gold, liquor and cigarettes perfuming the streets with bitter sweet poison, sticky with seed and sin.   
“Tired of everything.” Jade smiled, heaving himself up towards the diner’s door.  
“That’s why you’re doing this, starting over,” Adam linked arms with Jade. “I Don’t understand why you chose to do it here, but I guess its good you’re finally picking yourself up and getting over things.”   
“Getting over everything.” Jade nodded in finality. 

The diner was greasy and unremarkable, the shiny table top’s iridescence somewhat dimmed by layers of time, permanent stickiness seeping into the air. Adam drew his finger idly across the surface and examined a few grains of salt that had stuck to it, vestigial traces of the previous booth occupant’s meal. Jade ordered coffee, it’s bitter blackness intended solely for caffine, although the taste could not have been much worse. Adam picked at a blueberry muffin, tearing the top of it off and crumbling it’s insides like the carcass of a dissected rat in a laboratory. He piled up the blueberries.   
“Are you going to eat that thing?” Jade asked gravely.   
“What kind of apartment are you looking for?” Adam tried again, half expecting another stubborn, cryptic response.   
“Something that makes me happy, I guess.” Jade shrugged, dipping his finger in the coffee and watching it drip onto the table. The red vinyl seat squeaked weakly under him as he shifted.   
“So you’re waiting for a sign from God to come down and hit you on your thick head? You’re going to pick out living space because of intuition?!”  
“Intuition is a good thing to go by.”  
“Not when there’s priority stuff too…like convenience. Location, location, location, Jaderade.” Adam popped a blueberry into his mouth.   
“This city is my location!”

Adam groaned, burying his face into his arms across the table top, upsetting his plate with a gaudy clatter, some truckers, a broke punk couple, and other human flotsam throwing the two men an irritated glare. “Not this bullshit again.” Adam’s voice muffled through the layers of night. “You own me, Puget. I don’t know many people who would pile into the most unreliable whore of a car with their emotionally unstable friend and put around San Francisco all weekend looking for a condo.”  
“You’re married to me, with out the sex.” Jade blew ripples into his coffee thoughtfully. “I did like that one apartment. The second story flat just outside the city, you know.”  
“The only decent one we saw today, yes. Good luck with that.”  
“I have a chance! Just because I’m scrappy and whatnot and I have a shitty car does not mean that they won’t consider me.”  
“It’s not Donna’s fault, or your fault either, for that matter. It’s just that you were a couple hundred dollars under the asking price.”   
“That’s where the little “or best offer” bit came in handy.” Jade’s eyes had developed an almost unhealthy recognition for realty adds with the forever promising “or best offer” stamp of optimism upon them. He had enough confidence in his charming abilities. He could charm hundreds off of prices when the situation was desperate enough. He acquired Donna in such a manner, with such impressive charm.   
“Meh, it was a good enough flat that someone will be willing to pay what they asked for. Or what its worth.”   
“Aren’t you a cheery little bundle of sunshine.”  
“Just don’t get your hopes up, Jade. It might kill you.”   
“Hopes?! What hopes? What’s hope?” Jade said, sounding almost like he could handle the fact that hope and opportunity were no longer in his vocabulary. When you’re hurt enough for long enough, you learn to not hope for much. 

~*~

The light filtered dustily into their cheap motel through the moth eaten curtains of unremarkable brown color, casting shadows the color of decay, like gazing at the sun through a vial of Cola. Jade was sprawled across the squeaky stained mattress, limbs and hair in every direction as if he had been suddenly sedated in the midst of flailing panic or perhaps electrocution. His cell phone had rung only several second prior and was now pressed against Adam’s ear, tawny tresses still stuck to the remnants of the sleep he had just been startled from, his eyes blinking morning grogginess away. He was holding his breath. Someone had called about an apartment. THE apartment.   
A minute and 47 seconds later Adam threw himself at Jade’s bed, shaking his friend with childish, uninhibited vigor.  
“Wha..WHAT THE FUCK, AD.”  
“YOU GOT THE APARTMENT!” Adam screamed, dragging Jade into a haphazard sitting position in a mess of dirty hotel sheets, rather violently rubbing his wide knuckles into Jade’s hair. “You fucking lucky bastard!”  
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, will you hold on a sec and get off?! What? What apartment?”  
“The apartment.” Adam said ominously, grabbing Jade’s face in two palms and rubbing his stubbled cheeks joyously. He was bouncing on the bed, holding Jade’s shocked eyes with his own ecstatic ones.   
“The apartment.” Jade said breathlessly, attempting to shove Adam off, unsuccessfully.  
“The only piece of shit in this bastard city that wasn’t a joke! The apartment! Jade.” Adam stated very seriously, pinning Jade’s arms to his sides by shaking his shoulders with massive hands. “This calls for a celebratory round of drinks.” 

~*~

Remarkably, the young couple and their Irish Setter had seemed almost eager to get the apartment off of the market and off of their hands. It appeared imperative that Jade move in as soon as possible, and that all contracts were signed and understood. Adam was skeptical of their enthusiasm, but Jade was ecstatic for the first time in a long time, since the onset of what Adam liked to refer to as the bankrupt depression idiocy.   
“Are you sure you read everything in that contract?” Adam pressed as they surveyed Jade’s new place, gazing upwards to the low ceiling spidered with cracks and webs.   
“Of course I did. Why so paranoid?”  
“They were really hurrying things along, that’s all.” 

Jade was stroking the walls of the cramped bathroom with shocked awe, turning on all of the taps and fiddling excitedly with the light switches. “They probably just didn’t want me to back out, come to my senses and realize that I can’t afford San Francisco.”  
“Which you can’t.” Adam shouted from the bedroom, where he was feeling slightly claustrophobic. It wasn’t terribly small, certainly larger than the pathetic closets people had for steep rent at the heart of the city they had looked at yesterday afternoon, but definitely smaller than Adam would have been comfortable residing in. There was a tiny bedroom with a solitary window, a bathroom, and a kitchenette the apartment opened into. Something about the bed room, perhaps and lighting, made it appear if it were not a rectangle at all, but something strangely askew, like the walls didn’t meet up at real corners, giving it the illusion of cheated space. It made Adam uneasy, so he opened the window, hoping it might alleviate the unsettling sensation. 

“Dude, something’s off with the bedroom.” Adam shuddered, sitting down awkwardly on the floor, cocking his head to a side in order to further examine the corners. Perfect ninety degree angles, when he actually looked at them. "Huh." He mumbled, puzzled. Jade strode in from the bathroom meaningfully, practically bouncing on the balls of his feet. "Everything here's built on an incline, so there's a good chance something's slanted, doesn't bother me at all...look, I'll have the mattress here, and....my computer desk here." Jade said, gesturing from one wall to the other before capering to the window. "I can't believe something went right."

"Yeah, now it's just making the payments every month. You better get a fuckin' steady job, Jaderade." Adam said playfully, fiddling with the zipper of Jade's sleeping bag they had lugged up the outside stairs along with his air mattress, probably the only bed Jade would have for awhile until he picked up a couple of decent jobs. In the process of Jade losing his apartment, also known as the Consumption Period of the Bankrupt Depression and Idiocy, he had also managed to lose everything else, including his mattress and bed frame, which were sold along with the rest of his worldly belongings, save for his laptop computer. Adam had watched the alarming fiasco from the sidelines, only intervening when Jade made an ebay page for his clothing and toiletries, which seemed to Adam like some sort of delusional or suicidal indication that Jade was officially going around the bend. That was the ultimate low point, before Adam offered sharing his one bedroom in Echo Park so that he could monitor all of his friend's artistic insanity and potentially self destructive behavior. Luckily, Jade had slowly improved over the course of several months, enough to move out on his own and start writing again. Nevertheless, Adam still didn't like the idea of his occasionally emotionally unstable best friend who was prone to both anxiety attacks and depression living so far away from Los Angeles. It was a whole seven, expensive hours to drive in the case that Jade needed him, and Jade was usually incapable of going very long without needing Adam in some way. 

"Are you alright?" Jade asked, jolting Adam out of his reverie. Adam found the question mildly, amusingly ironic. "Yeah, I'm fine, it's just really claustrophobic in here...and cold. Which is weird. Who knew any part of California was cold in the middle of August?"  
"I told you this city was a winner." Jade grinned. "Come on, want to get dinner?"   
Adam nodded to Jade's face, and shook his head perplexedly once Jade was turned around and digging a clean shirt out of his unzipped suitcase that had exploded all over the floor. It was good to see him happy, good to see him looking up, excited about something. Even if it was a musty little cracker box that gave Adam the creeps Jade was so excited about.   
"You're a crazy kid, Jade." Adam called, following the sounds of flying leaps constant chatter.  
~*~

He couldn't remember much before this afternoon, when the sound of four, heavy feet thumping around on the outside staircase had roused him from the cobwebs, the dust. He was faintly aware that time had passed in between the last time he heard that noise and this afternoon, lonely time, yawning hours of emptiness marked by changing light, flies coming and going and eventually dying on the windowsill, dust particles settling and forming colonies in his corners. How long this loneliness stretched on for he could not remember, only that it was too excruciating to exist through, so he had evaporated, faded away, wandered around the also lonesome alleys sharing his company with trash dumpsters and skinny cats. It was hard for him to exist without people, people thumping on the outside stairs, cooking on the stoves, fucking in the beds.   
But this afternoon. The sound was familiar, welcomed. He watched from the window, from behind the curtain of city noise, holding himself for whatever, whoever might appear. The door opened and two men thumped in, speaking so loudly he vibrated painfully. Even then, he could feel his vision getting clearer, the window getting thinner, the prickling sensation intensifying across the surfaces his limbs may have once inhabited. He regarded their forms, their intense, radiating warmth. The taller, bigger one projected a sensation of water, and blue. He seemed laid back, and to be perpetually humoring the other one, who radiated constant, electric light. The little one flitted from one side to the other talking nonstop, pulsing with so much life, so much warmth, so much...insanity.   
He immediately wanted him, wanted to be him, wanted to feel and run and laugh and break. He wanted to touch him, touch his freckled arm, the corn silk wing of his blonde hair, wanted to catch the fine strands of it between his fingertips. He hoped he was moving in. He hoped so badly, tried to eavesdrop on a language he once knew and was proficient in, but now sounded clumsy and foreign. He caught rhyming words, winner and dinner. He knew what those meant, words from another lifetime. The little one sang. The prickling became wonderful, unbearable.   
"You're a crazy kid, Jade." The Blue man drawled.  
Jade. Jade. Jay-duh. Jay-d. Jayd.   
The prickling reached it's capacity, the white noise ringing of static on a television, hot and too much to handle. He opened his eyes through the dust, and the room rippled like the tide.

~*~

A noisy bang resounded from the living room area, and both Adam and Jade flinched from where they were locking up the door. "What the fuck was that?" Jade cringed, turning the key back the other way and tentatively sidestepping through the sad excuse for a kitchen area, flipping on a light. The window, which they had left open to air the musty smell out, had abruptly snapped shut. Jade's heart thumped rapidly in his chest, still uneasy. Loud sounds always shook him up.   
"What happened?" Adam asked from the door. 

"Nothing, the window fell closed...I'll have to get a piece of wood or something to jam it up. No big deal." He shrugged and was just about to grab and sweater before leaving when he noticed that his suitcase, which he had dumped on one side of the room, had mysteriously migrated to the other, strewing random articles of clothing in its wake. He stared at it. "What the fuck." He mumbled; his heart sped up again, just as it was beginning to slow to something normal. He swallowed awkwardly, puzzled and feeling glued to his spot on the floor. He still wanted that sweater, the room was absolutely freezing after all, his breath showed... but he was afraid to touch his suitcase, irrationally afraid that some sort of demon or gigantic rat was hiding inside of it, making it capable of independent movement and telepathic window shutting.   
"Come on man, it's cold in here." Adam whined.

"I'm getting a sweater." He said quietly, not quite sure if Adam heard him. He crept to this suitcase, picking at the clothes with a disgusted thumb and forefinger. He finally found the desired sweater, balled up in the farthest corner, a corner dark with demon and rat potentials. He safely acquired it, able to snap his hand away without missing any fingers. 

As he and Adam trotted down the rickety wooden stairs that wrapped around the outside of the building, Jade shivering and heart rate slowly dissipated into the night, which became progressively warmer as they traveled down from the flat. He felt incredibly stupid now. Windows closed all the time on their own, and he could have moved the suitcase on his own during his state of manic excitement. Nevertheless, he thought about what Adam had said earlier. Something's off with the bedroom.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm totally not asexual or greysexual, in fact I had never even heard the latter term when I wrote this five years ago and thought I was really clever for inventing it, lol. Anyway I hope it's an ok depiction for all you ace kids out there!

Jade's first night in the new flat went by uneventfully, with zero paranormal activity or mysteriously mobile luggage. It had taken him an hour or so of uneasy tosses and turns on the leaking inflatable air mattress to actually fall asleep, each creak of the window or wall sending his eyes snapping open and heart up into his throat. Then he'd lie stiffly, limbs tensed and ready to spring into defense mode if any threat presented itself, threats like monstrous rats or demons. Jade's restless anxiety eventually faded, and he finally drifted into a stiff sleep, arms tight around an under stuffed pillow. The exhaustion should have permitted a deep, undisturbed slumber, but instead he dreamed heavily, slow paced languid dreams about guardian angels and things watching him from the corners, the cracks, the windows. 

He woke up with a start, drowning in his own sweat-cold sheets, floundering in the oppressive invasion of early morning coastal light. He wished that once, just one morning he could wake up peacefully instead of startled and panicky, instead of Adam flouncing on top of him yelling about something. His flighty hands attacked his own neck, tearing at the sensation of betraying sheets wrapped craftily around it, kicking the bed spread hastily off the air mattress like a coiled sea monster. It seemed like all of his belongings were out to get him, startle and strangle and rip him apart, slither across his floor and make him feel crazier than he already was. 

Jade knew he had slept alone last night, that Adam went home with a rail thin Asian woman he bought plentiful drinks for all evening, leaving Jade to brave the horrors of the public transportation on his own. Despite this knowledge, Jade couldn't help but feel like he had spent the entire night in someone's watchful company, someone needy and longing and feeding off his warmth. It wasn't an entirely unpleasant feeling, but it forced Jade to come to the conclusion that he was sharing the flat with something alive, possibly cockroaches or rats, either potential totally unwelcome. 

The light was obscenely bright, making Jade squinted in its presence, fumbling about his bedside for his mobile phone. It's illuminated screen cheerfully told him it was six thirty four a.m, and Jade groaned in response. "Fuckin' cockroaches..." He mumbled, rubbing his eyes with his palms. Jade possessed the annoying quality many artists shared: the inability to fall back asleep once naturally awaken. On many occasions he tried to return to his dreams, but instead he'd lay uncomfortably staring at the ceiling, mind running away with itself, bit firmly between the teeth, no reins. This only led to more anxiety, and unproductive anxiety on top of that, so after years of living with himself Jade decided that once he woke up, it was best to haul himself from bed and into the shower, brew a pot of coffee and engage in something productive. It was exhausting, having personality disorders.

Most unfortunate about the entire situation this morning was that the apartment was decidedly barren. His suitcase, bedding, and beloved laptop affectionately named Buffy (after certain blonde vampire slayers who had on occasion saved Jade from suicide,) were the only things present in its interior. He had yet to purchase a Verizon card to hook Buffy up to wireless, preventing him from having any internet access unless he literally plugged her into the phone jack, an attachment he did not possess. This general remove from the bustling city outside allowed Jade to do nothing but test out his new shower, using the tiny shampoo and lotion bottles he stole from the hotel last night. Not exactly the most exciting activity to do in all of San Francisco, but he was limited in his options. Maybe once he cleaned himself up he and Donna could explore the surrounding area for a hardware store, buy some rat poison and apply to every establishment within walking distance. Adam could enjoy his Asian girl and her apartment without him.   
Jade fiddled with the soap-stained and troublesome tap, hopping from one foot to the other until the weak-powered spray warmed up. As he scrubbed and swayed dizzily in the steam, he watched the glittering water droplets collect all along the plastic sliding doors, watching him, waiting for him like the cockroaches. He found himself almost tempted to tell them "stop, I'm naked. A little privacy, please," but realized the ridiculousness of talking to inanimate objects. This caused him to think of Adam. For as long as he could remember, Jade and Adam had leaned on each other (perhaps a little unevenly, Adam was sturdy and rarely needed support, where Jade had the tendency to sag and bend in the wind like a weak reed.) They lived close, Jade in an apartment in Burbank, Adam in Echo Park, so midnight panic attacks were usually alleviated after the fifteen minutes or so it took Adam to throw on some clothes and grudgingly drive to Burbank. 

This made the prospect of moving so far north laden with doubtful fear. Jade recognized that as an adult, he really should break free from the people who babied him, really forge the way to success and responsible living on his own. It was unfair to rely so heavily on Adam, who was a free spirit and a laid back guy, sure, but who certainly had his shit together. Jade rinsed his hair out, eyes shut tightly at the soapy water coursed down face and puddled on the poorly draining floor. As far as having his shit together went, the instances of stability in Jade's life were few and far between. However, he liked to think he was in one; the last month or two had been surprisingly...productive. Surprisingly depression-free. (There was less he could say for the manic portions of his personality, they had certainly been manic months, full of sleepless nights and four a.m. cleaning sprees, but it beat wanting to kill himself.) 

As he turned off the water (which ran unpleasantly cold in the process), and stepped clumsily onto the makeshift bath mat he created with a folded towel, he was thinking that he could live without Adam. He could live, on his own, in a strange city and function, prove to all the people who had systematically abandoned him for his alleged insanity that he wasn't crazy after all. Jade was about to put on his snappiest clothes, shave, and hit the streets of San Francisco in search of a job when he accidentally looked at the mirror, and yelped. The towel which was previously slung low on his hips fell completely to the ground, and he simultaneously tried to cover himself up from whatever mysterious force he was sharing his flat with, and hop out of the bathroom so he wasn't sharing space with it at all. "What the fuck!" Jade yipped, backing defensively into the corner, peering wide eyed through the steam that floated lazily around the tiny bathroom quarters. 

Written in a sloppy hand in the condensation that gathered on the mirror, was the nonsensical letter combination :  
J A Y d ? 

Jade stared at it disbelievingly, holding frantic fists of his newly cleaned hair and sinking to the floor on top of his fallen towel. "Oh my god," he breathed, sounding the message out. "Jaayd...Jade. WHAT THE FUCK, THERE ARE LITERATE RATS IN MY HOUSE!" He shrieked, painfully aware of the fact that there was no one in the house save for the said rats to hear him. He tried closing his yes and reopening then just like people did in the movies, partially hoping he had imagined the message, partially hoping that it would remain, proving his eyesight and mind intact. The last thing he needed was one more notch on the crazy belt. 

Jade finally came to his senses, realizing that he was sitting mostly naked on the floor, legs a messy sprawl, heart a throat-navigating beast of impressive endurance. He was panting as if he'd either run up and down the stairs several times, came really hard, or witnessed the unspeakable. He was miserable over the fact that out of three options, the reality was the last, and worst. Shuddering to his knees and looking shiftily over his shoulder, Jade thundered out the door clutching the towel around his waist, trailing wisps of steam behind him. Immediately finding his phone in a heap of sheets he speed dialed Adam, clutching at his painfully tight throat. Adam picked up on the first ring, sounding both irritated and complacent. It was a frustrating way for someone to sound to someone who was panicking.   
"Jade, what do you want?"

"Where are you?" Jade asked quickly, keeping the bathroom door in his line of vision, watching it for potential axe murders. 

"Jade..." Adam said exhaustedly, exhaling explosively into the receiver. "I'm at Emily's apartment in Sausalito. Seriously man, she's...wow." Adam whistled suggestively. 

"You can tell me the details of your sex life later man, but I seriously need your ass over here right now. There's someone in my apartment." He said in a hushed tone. He really wished he had some sort of weaponry, some sort of rat fighting sword of doom. His fingers itched anxiously on his cell phone. He heard Adam sigh dramatically on the other line. "Are you still asleep, man?"

"NO, Adam, please, will you just listen to me? I got out of the shower, and someone had written my name, all fucked up, on the mirror." Jade said urgently.   
"Your name on the mirror."   
"Yes."

"I dunno man, it sounds like a B-slasher movie to me...I leave you alone for ONE NIGHT and you go flippin' insane again..." Adam muttered. Jade could hear a feminine voice somewhere next to Adam, but he hardly felt bad for interrupting whatever he had interrupted. He figured it was most likely sleep, considering the brutal hour of seven in the morning he was calling at. He was not crazy, he was sure of it this time. "Fine then, man, you keep boning whatshername over there in Sausalito, and I'll take on the literate rat infestation over here. Some friend."  
Another pained sigh. "Come on Jaderade, don't be that way...look, I don't have a car over here, but I can see if Emily-" 

Jade huffily hung up on Adam, determined to demonstrate his rarely seen practical side in the face of household danger. There was obviously no one lurking in the apartment; Jade would have seen them in at least one of the three rooms the flat consisted of, one of the three rooms he had to tear naked through to rescue his mobile, so that ruled out the B movie slashers and axe murders. The likeliness of a rat capable of spelling was slim to none, (though Jade had encountered some pretty smart cockroaches in his lifetime; LA was crawling with them,) and Jade didn't believe in ghosts. This led him to two possible conclusions concerning his misspelled name: In the middle of the night he sleep walked to the bathroom, abandoned all his training in spelling, and conducted a short, bizarre love affair with the mirror. That, or he imagined the whole thing and was clearly hallucinating. Regardless, they both pointed to that pesky insanity rumor that had haunted him half of his life. 

This was frustrating. Jade concluded it was time to man up, put some boxers on, and examine the message in further detail. He was totally nervous about the entire thing. It wasn't every day his mirrors tried to communicate with him. That was out of the ordinary, even during the lowest point of the Bankrupt Depression Idiocy days. He took a deep unstable breath, ignoring the drips from his hair that slid, creeping and chilly onto his shoulder and down the dip of his spine. 

The journey from his rumbled bedding to the still steamy closet of a bathroom seemed heinously long, and he found himself stopping in his tracks to listen for any out of place noises. He reached the bathroom, flung open the door, and faced a nice vacancy. Anticlimactic nothing. The message remained, drawn in big sweeping letters. J A Y D ? Whoever, or whatever wrote his name had very poor, childish handwriting, or maybe some sort of uncontrollable tremor to their hand. It looked like Jade's hand writing when he was drunk, three years old, or writing with his left hand and eyes closed. Jade bit his lip, examining the four letters with his eyes narrowed and head cocked at every angle. Nothing about it changed. He had a horrible case of the shivers, all of his fine neck hairs standing up on end and coursing with a cool, invisible energy. It wasn't entirely bad feeling. In fact, it made him feel slightly like he was stoned, or on laughing gas. 

"Get a hold of yourself, man." He mumbled, holding a palm up to the still condensation fogged mirror, feeling very stupid. Then, feeling even more stupid, Jade held up a long, spidery finger and touched it to the mirror, carefully spelling out "J A D E." He stared lamely at his handiwork for a moment, disgusted at his own disappointment when a response didn't magically appear. He began to seriously doubt his sanity. This must be why people wanted to prescribe him something. 

Jade sheepishly gathered the bathmat-towel off the floor, wadding it into a damp little ball and using it to wipe both versions of his name clear off the mirror in order to prevent any more confusion. There was one thing left to do. The mirror had to go. Life was going swell, just swimmingly, until this mirror started throwing curveballs at him and talking in code. Jade wiggled his fingers, placing them around the edges of the thin sheet of glass, and pried it from the wall. It took some effort to remove, but after a few concentrated minutes of focused tugging, it separated from the wall, poorly held by an ancient, yellowed adhesive. He placed it carefully on the floor, avoiding its sharp corners. The wall behind the mirror was a shade paler than the surrounding area, creamy and monotone instead of the sun dappled and water damaged plastic it neighbored. 

The first thing Jade noticed about the wall behind the mirror was the fist sized hole punched in the dry wall, near the lower left corner. A surge of excitement rose in his chest and expanded, swelling his throat and brightening his eyes. He braced a palm to one side and reached a trembling hand inside, wary or rats, wary of insects, excited to hold whatever was wadded inside, dust covered and shaved into the farthest away corner. His heart beat rapid fire, sweat building on the crest of his brow. Inside of his newfound hidey hole, Jade found a drivers license and some cash. The bills were folded and held together by a grey, crusted rubber band remnant that all but crumbled when he prudently picked up its contents. He brushed the gummy rubber away, noting its total lack of elastic. He counted the bills, coming up with a total of two hundred and twenty three dollars. Not bad, not at all. 

Generally, even in his most broke state, Jade would have felt bad taking any money he found, even in a situation like this when the owner no longer lived in the apartment and he had little means of reaching him. It was not in his nature to scavenge, not in his nature to survive by any means necessary. However, he felt he had been LED to this money. It was in HIS flat, under HIS name, even if the force who showed him the way lacked in spelling talents. As far as he was concerned, this was HIS money. 

Jade found himself oddly afraid to look at the driver's license. There was nothing personal about a wad of cash; bills switched ownership one thousand times a day, jumping from one eager palm to the other, never committing, never residing. Money was tied to a million different people, a million different finger prints and strands of DNA. A drivers license, on the other hand, was as personal a belonging as you could get. A human's entire identity relied on this one, tiny rectangle of plastic. Jade wouldn't be caught dead without his own. It felt strange to be caught holding someone else's. 

But curiosity got the better of him, and he scraped it out of the hole, cringing at the way the dust stuck under his nails. He turned it over in his palms, wiping the thick, oily strands of spider web and clotted plaster power off its still vaguely shiny surface. There was some minor scratches and sun damage from years of being carried in a wallet, most likely, but Jade had very little issue reading the name proclaimed in straight, serious block letters on the plastic : David Marchand. 

"David, huh?" Jade whispered, all his vestiges of nerves or fear faded completely and replaced with excitement. David Marchand. He could tell David was handsome, even in the mug-shot like drivers license picture no one ever looked good in. He had a strong, narrow jaw which made his face full of angles seem even sharper, kind brown eyes, and wavy black hair pulled into a tight bun. The quirky half smile barely gracing his lips made him look tired but friendly, seeming to say "I know this is going to look horrible, so can we get it over with? I have somewhere important to be." Jade mimicked the smile, turning the card over again. Age, 26. The man in the photo looked much younger than 26, much too attractive to be nearing thirty. Jade shrugged and took David Marchand back to the living room, stuffing his knowing smirk into the pocket of the crumpled jeans he planned to wear today, satisfied and smug to be holding such a strange secret close to his thigh. "David Marchand, thank you for the cash." Jade sighed, tugging on his faded denim pants and patting the pocket. "I needed that."

~*~

The other side of the Bay was officially Adam's favorite place. More specifically, the crimson and gold silk sheets tangled on the king sized four post in Emily's oriental themed beach house on the other side of the Bay was Adam's new favorite place. Emily sat adjacently to them last night at the crowded Italian pasta place they celebrated at, flirting subtly with Adam every time they made involuntary eye contact, smiling a geisha smile, coy and gentle. Adam had always harbored a special interest in Asian girls because of their understated beauty and secret smiles. He felt like they were keeping something shocking hidden under the carefully constructed veneer of composure, and Adam wanted in on the secret, wanted to rob them of that stifled exterior. Emily was no exception, but she was the first of his oriental conquests that actually had something to hide, something to reveal. He was smitten from the second she knocked him to the bed with a sharp elbow and called him a slut. 

After a sharing a pot of hazelnut coffee and some jellied toast with his new mistress, the afterglow of the previous night's adventures wore off, replaced with guilt for abandoning his best friend not only yesterday, but this morning. Although Adam would have preferred to munch his toast from the mica flecked ebony table top and watch Emily conduct business transactions over the phone, swaying coyly in her silk, scarlet robe, he had a responsibility on the other side of the bay who was currently flipping out over imaginary home invaders. Perhaps he was doing Jade some sort of favor by not running to his neurotic side every time something went marginally wrong, giving him a taste of what it would be like on Monday when Adam had to drive back to Echo Park for work. 

He wandered out to the balcony, tightening Emily's black, embroidered bath towel around his waist. He dialed Jades number, bracing himself and expecting the worst. He cringed when Jade answered.   
"Hey man." He sounded oddly at ease. Adam remained on guard, wary of any of Jade's moods following a freak out.   
"What happened to the home invader?" Adam asked carefully, gritting his teeth. The sounds of the ocean lapping gently along the tide-less bay and the sail boats creaking quietly like sleepy animals calmed him slightly.   
"What?"   
"The slasher who broke in and vandalized your mirror?" 

"Oh, yeah, I dunno. I still have no idea where that came from, I guess I just have a possessed mirror. But hey, Adam, I pried if off the wall and guess what I found behind there?" Jade babbled excitedly, his voice climbing several octaves in the process.   
"Um, a termite infestation?"

"I hole in the wall housing a wad of cash. Over two hundred bucks, just stuffed behind the mirror. Someone's savings they forgot about maybe. Weird, huh?" 

Adam stood silent for a moment, observing the pelicans swooping into the water and trailing fountains behind them once they caught their breakfast. Jade was a lot of things, but he wasn't a liar. As a writer, he was well versed in the art of embellishment, but lying about two big, strange things consecutively in one day would be out of character, even for him. Regardless, Adam had a hard time believing that in the course of one morning alone, Jade had battled B-movie slasher's misspellings in his bathroom and discovered a previous tenants emergency cash. "Definitely weird." He finally answered, absently kicking at the balcony railing. "What are you up to now?"

"Oh, just picking up some stuff to patch up my air mattress and a phone cable for Buffy...I need to get online and look for cheapo appliances on Craigslist."

"I'm boggled by you sudden self sufficiency. Maybe you were right after all, San Francisco is going to magically cure all your disorders!" Adam said, shaking his head. "By the way, sorry I ditched you last night Jaderade...but this Emily chick? YOU HAVE NO IDEA."  
'I'm sure I don't. " Jade said with an eyeroll, cluelessly perusing the dingy aisles of the closest hardware store. He noted that Adam hushed his voice when talking about Emily, suggesting he was still within earshot of her instead of on some bus back to the city.

"She's KINKY AS FUCK! Like, straight out of a Japanese porno, man."   
"She's Japanese?" Jade asked, cocking an eyebrow. He remembered hearing horror stories about Japanese porn, that it almost always involved something messed up like tentacles, urine, or incest. It was perfectly   
like Adam to be into the grossest thing he could find. 

"Nah man, she's like, Korean or something, but who cares? She's hot."   
"Hmm, I'm happy for you." Jade did not sound happy. He merely sounded indifferent, considering this was one of the many stories he had heard about Adam's latest Asian kink princess, all of which included the mention of Japanese pornos. It was tiresome, this eastern fetish of Adam's. 

"You need to get laid, Jaderade. I know I tell you that all the time, but I mean it. The last time was, God, that Hunter guy? The junkie? That was over a year ago." 

Jade froze in his tracks. Adam knew it was off limits to mention and discuss his few, all failed relationships. Hunter had been an athletic little blonde thing who ranged between two extremes, much like Jade did: there was a manic and occasionally belligerently violent side of Hunter, and then the sleepy, catatonic side. Adam spent four of the seven months Jade and Hunter dated trying to convince Jade that his boyfriend was doing drugs, but Jade would hear none of it. The violence was never directed at him, and he wasn't a terribly sex-craving person, so the sleepiness didn't bother him too much either. Of course, two weeks before their eighth month anniversary, it came out that Hunter smoked meth to wake up, and shot up heroin to go to sleep. He hid the habits well; shooting up between his toes and into his gums to prevent the appearance of track marks. Everyone gave Jade a big whopping "I told you so," but he was never in love with Hunter, so he didn't take the blow too personally. Regardless, it was an embarrassing fact that he dated an addict for five months short of a year and was too self absorbed to pick up on the signals. 

"Some of us don't put as much emphasis on sex as you do, Adam."   
"People who say that are the ones who don't get laid enough." He responded snappily. "Look, I gotta go, Emily's off the phone, but I'll see you tonight, ok? Hey, since you're in San Francisco now, they'll be more gay guys. Look for a lay while you're out there Jaderade, that's all I can say." Adam meant to sound encouraging, but came off sounding desperate. On the other line, Jade's eyes were getting a full-scale work out with all the arduous rolling they were engaging in. "Alright Ad, I'll jump into bed with the first good looking, non-junkie guy I see, for your sake," he quipped with plenty of cynical exaggeration, but Adam had already hung up, and Jade suspected, disrobed as well, ready to be readmitted into the clutches of his new Korean goddess and her Japanese porno bedroom. Jade rolled his eyes one last time, just for good measure. 

The aisles of the hardware store were clogged and dirty, the air seemingly thick with dust and flies. In fact, the windows were covered in such a hefty layer of grime the light filtering in had an unhealthy yellowish tone to it, making Jade feel as if he were swimming in a tank of urine. The sensation was disconcerting and Jade was realizing that he knew absolutely nothing about hardware, making the entire excursion totally frustrating. At the cluttered front of the store, the counter seemed unoccupied, but Jade rang the sliver bell adhered to its surface with peeling duct tape, wiping the oily coating it left on his index finger off with the hem of his shirt. To Jade's surprise, a shockingly well groomed young man bounced to the front desk, a chewed pencil tucked neatly behind his ear. "Can I help you?" He said, chipper and practically glowing from the inside out. He gave Jade an unabashed once over, raising a well plucked eyebrow once his eyes settled back on Jade's. The offer was heavy with double meaning. 

"Uh...my er, air mattress has a... a leak." Jade said stupidly, hating that the sentence sounded suggestive when he clearly did not mean for it to.   
"Your air mattress, huh? "   
"Yup." Jade nodded, shuffling his feet, uncomfortable under the man's scrutiny. "I need like...a patch, or...something."

The man behind the counter let himself out, bouncing genially on the balls of his feet. "Follow me." Slender and clean cut, he looked out of place in the hardware store's close, dank interior, like a shiny copper penny glinting from a trash clogged gutter. He wasn't particularly good looking, but was immaculately groomed, and Jade noted his toned and sinewy arms, ending in exceptionally attractive hands. It compensated for his mediocre complexion, (his cheeks were pockmarked with the teenage ghosts of acne scars,) and buggy green eyes. Jade supposed there was something about him, but he was simply not interested. He actually felt bad for following the man into aisle he briskly led him too, as if trailing after him would lead him on. He self consciously ducked his head when the man turned around to address him. "My name's Mark." He said, holding out one of his nice hands. Jade shook it reluctantly. "Jade."  
"Interesting name." 

"Yeah, my mom wanted me to be the only kid in my class with my name. To many Toms and Marks." He said, catching himself after the words left his mouth. "Uh, no offense. Mark's a fine name."   
"No offense taken, only Jade in his class." Mark said, holding up his pretty palms in mock surrender. "You new around here? Cause I uh, hadn't seen you in the store before." Mark actually twirled as curl of his shiny auburn hair around an index finger, cocking his head at Jade. 

"Yup, just moved in yesterday. Hence the air mattress."   
"Where from?"  
"Uh, Burbank, it's near LA..."  
"Ah, So Cal. I know where Burbank is. I guess guys from So Cal are the only ones who can call it So Cal, right?"  
Jade shrugged. "I never call it that."  
"You know, they say Nor Cal and So Cal are two different states, practically. You're in the better one, by the way." Mark said with a wink. "Welcome to 'Frisco."  
"Thanks."

"Fresh meat." Mark said snidely, glancing over his shoulder at Jade while he rifled through the rubble on the filthy shelf, peering into its depths. Jade was too startled to respond. "There are adhesive patches somewhere in here, I swear this lace carries everything, you just need to know how to find it." 

Jade nodded, as if Mark could actually see him from where he was immersed, waist deep in random hardware. "If you know anyone whose looking to get rid of some appliances, I'd love to know. I uh, went a little crazy before I moved up here and sold basically everything I own, so I'm looking to buy back some essentials with that money."

"Aha." Mark said triumphantly, holding up a package of navy blue patches up for Jade to see. "Told you I could find them. And about the appliances, I could ask my room mate, he collects all sorts of weird shit. Um, no that sort of room mate, though." Mark added quickly, handing the patches to Jade, who took them without looking up at his hopeful eyes. This was the fifth, miserable month Mark had been single, and very rarely did anyone young or attractive ever cross through the threshold of the hardware store. 

During his college Mark had been a party boy like everyone else, part of the complicated network of San Francisco State boys that all fucked and dumped each other on a near daily basis. It had been loads of fun, loads of drugs, loads of other things he couldn't remember...but as the years stretched on, Mark found himself becoming more and more exhausted with such an indulgent, lavish lifestyle. Like everyone else it made him feel wanted for awhile, like an attractive and desirable article of clothing everyone passed around and fawned over, but no one had the time to wash and care for. After being worn so many times, his designer label was coming off; he was getting rips and holes. He was no longer stylish, merely comfortable, too comfortable for the same old drugs, the same old gossip and boys and colorful mixing straws in martinis each bass-line and strobe light soaked night. Mark was tired of meaningless sex. He wanted a boyfriend, someone to come home to, to patch up leaking air mattresses up with and take care of.

He led Jade to the cash register, looking over his shoulder occasionally to make sure he hadn't gotten lost in the towering aisles of crap. Jade was a little flustered, obviously overwhelmed by the new city, the unexpected hospitality, stopping occasionally to gaze around him in awe, and once to grab a phone jack. Mark thought maybe he had come on too strong. He always talked too much. Jade dumped the patches and phone cord on the counter, fishing out his wallet. His finger brushed unexpectedly against David Marchand's I.D, and this stomach dropped unexpectedly. He had forgotten he put it in there, and it made him weirdly happy to remember it, giving him the same feeling as recalling a good dream, or knowing he was going to open a birthday present. It was a childish elation feeling he hadn't experienced in a long time. 

"Is that all?" Mark asked, ringing him up.   
"That's it." Jade nodded, absentmindedly fingering the edge of the card in his pocket.   
"Alright. Say, stop by in a day or two, and I'll tell you if my room mate has a microwave or something."   
"Oh, right, thanks." Jade responded, gathering up his bag and turning to leave. He was halfway to the door when Mark said something, making him stop unhappily in his tracks, torn between feeling nice someone was taking interest in him, and feeling terrible that he was incapable of taking interest in that person, despite his handsome hands and hyper-cleanliness. "Jade, since you're new and all, I could take you to the Castro, introduce you to some people, if you wanted. Show you all Nor Cal has to offer, per say." Mark said anxiously, voice oddly thin. Jade turned around slowly, forcing a smile and feeling like a genuinely rotten person. "Thanks, man. I'll see you around, right?" Jade said. 

"Yeah, right." Mark smiled weakly, mentally kicking himself in the ass for looking so desperate. Jade seemed like a perfectly nice guy, a little quiet and awkward, sure, but lively none the less. He didn't seem like a party boy, one of the countless, fit tweakers who paraded the Castro District, feeding off of glass pipes, lube, and drama. Mark didn't feel like one of those boys either, but who was he to say he was above a lifestyle he fed into for years. He wondered if Jade would come back at all, if he needed appliances badly enough he'd face air swirling with dust and a washed up, worthless ex-party boy who wasn't good enough for someone like that, anyway. 

~*~

The entire, stumbling walk from the hardware store to the grocery store, Jade subjected himself to a heavy dost of mental abuse. It was clear that he lacked the crucial social skills needed to carry himself through normal, common situations, such as getting hit on by sort of cute employees at local establishments. This always happened. At twenty seven, Jade's comprehensive relationship experience was limited to a grand total of three boyfriends, all of which had liked him marginally more than he remembered liking them. 

All of Jade's relationships had followed the same, vicious circles. Circles that began with situations exactly like the one he had just walked away from: A perfectly acceptable boy showed an interest, and Jade balked. In every instance, he was completely capable of recognizing that the prospect was attractive, charming, eligible...all the things a single man such as himself would have been looking for. Regardless of these traits, Jade's unfailing, automatic reaction ever single time was a big, red, flashing "NO," sign, flopping around fiercely in between him and whatever poor boy was trying, so Jade was incapable of missing it. Then, just like this afternoon, Jade would sulk away from the crime scene feeling guilty, rationalizing the circumstance exactly like he was currently doing, beating himself up for his unwarranted air of disinterest concerning anyone at all who showed an interest in him. 

He was thinking critically about Mark now, about how he acted when presented with the prospective date or whatever it was that Mark offered. Mark was a cute enough guy. He was employed, (at a hardware store, of all ambitious places, but it was more than Jade could say for himself), he was friendly, he was helpful, and, most important at all, he was interested. That much was evident. However, as soon as that interest became apparent, the flashing red NO sign with all of its frantic crimson bulbs switching on and off at a headache inducing pace popped up into Jade's line of vision, blocking everything else out. He always did this, every damn time. He'd see a boy, the boy would try, Jade would balk, Jade would leave, and after he left, he's feel horrible and stupid for not being nicer or more interested in a perfectly eligible candidate, and then Jade would run groveling back, get a number, book his calendar, hoping that maybe he was wrong. This was how he got himself into those relationships with men whose feeling exceeded his own. In fact, Jade couldn't remember a single person, a single human being he actually wanted to touch in a sexual way, anyone whose pants he wanted to rip off, driven by lust or passion or any of those foreign feelings people talked about in trashy dime store romance novels. He would have thought those feelings were the workings of myth if it hadn't been for Adam, who not only serial dated but serial fucked, serial fucked beautiful oriental woman after beautiful oriental woman, referring to each one with words like passion and lust. 

Jade often wondered if he was asexual. Once he brought it up to Adam one horrible night a year or so ago, when Jade made minimum wage ushering at Hollywood concert venues like the Gibson and the Avalon. Adam met him at the Gibson, (which at the time was still Universal Amphitheater, nestled between the theme park and the city walk, before Gibson guitars bought it out and slapped on their name) taking him out to dinner at one of the ten thousand over priced establishments at Universal Citywalk. Unsurprisingly, their waiter at the Hard Rock Cafe was a belligerently flamboyant young gay film student from USC, like many of the workers who oiled Universal City's gears. He unabashedly, shamelessly hit on both Jade and Adam, but mostly Jade after Adam's then girlfriend, an unsuccessful but plucky Taiwanese singer song writer, Megan. 

The waiter was not unlike Mark in a lot of ways. He had been good looking, witty, clean, holding a steady job conveniently close to Jade...but the NO sign alighted itself on their table, illuminating Megan and Adam's disgruntled faces in scarlet, tinting Freddy Mercury's pants, Brittany Spear's dental floss status panties, and Eddie Van Halen's guitar the color of blood behind their glass casings. Adam was totally baffled as to why Jade wasn't flirting back as aggressively as their snappy waiter would have liked him to be. 

"He gave us dessert on the house, Jade. He wants your COCK."   
Jade had looked around him quickly, mortified. Cock? He had a cock? He had totally forgotten about that. "Lower your voice, Adam, Jesus."   
"Come on man, why are you so shy allofa sudden?"   
"He's not my type?" Jade tried, not so sure.   
"Bullshit, I can even tell this guy's hot." 

Megan had giggled into her napkin at that remark, hand disappearing under the table and wandering somewhere around Adam's thigh. The NO sign's abrasive redness made her blushing cheeks even pinker.   
"Maybe I'm asexual." Jade finally said, throwing up his hands in defeat. "Because the only guys I ever want to do anything with are completely out of the question."  
"Aw, like who, Jaderade? I bet you're underestimating..."  
"like Johnny Depp and Dave Navarro."   
"Oh." 

The conversation had continued along these lines for the remainder of dinner, Adam making valiant efforts to convince Jade he wasn't asexual and merely hadn't found the right man yet. Megan could tell the Spanish Inquisition style interrogation was making Jade feel terribly uncomfortable, so she kept on trying to steer the situation to less lethal topics, like Freddy Mercury's pants, for example, which were hanging directly above the dinner table in all their red pleather glory. But Adam was clueless.   
"What about sex, man, you like sex, right?" He pressed on. 

"I like jacking off, and sex if I pretend the person I'm having sex with it Johnny Depp."  
"You're not asexual if you like sex, you're just...picky...You're Johnny Deppsexual!"   
Megan lightly punched Jade's arm across the table. "You and me both, sweetie."   
"I just think you need to expand your horizons. Date a few guys you wouldn't normally date, it might change your mind." 

Jade rolled his eyes, looking plaintively at Megan for assistance. "All the guys I've dated have been guys I normally wouldn't date. Because I think I'm asexual."  
"You're not asexual!" Adam said desperately. He was acting as if asexuality were a bad thing, as if he were a conservative family values proponent that Jade had just confessed his homosexuality to.   
"I'm Johhny Deppsexual, we've established this." Jade smirked at Megan, who shook her head.   
"Okay, okay well. So the sex thing, do you want to have sex with Johnny Depp."

"I'd actually prefer having a discussion about art with him over coffee, but a blowjob wouldn't be entirely unwelcome." Jade answered, sipping meaningfully at the straw in his soda, making the rest of the table snort.

"Adam, maybe he's just not as sexually inclined as you," Megan tried, swatting him playfully on the arm, eyes pleading. "He's into intellectual intercourse, gets off on talking, on intelligent conversation."   
Jade raised his hands. "Precisely. Megan gets double points on that one, for being right and for the Alanis Morrisette reference." Jade and Megan hit high fives across the table, and Adam dropped his head exasperatedly into his toned arms. "You two are both fags." 

The incident at the Hard Rock was the last time Jade brought up his potential sexuality, or lack therof, to Adam. Since then he and Buffy had scanned a number of Pro-Asexuality forums late at night when he was especially lonely, and the more he did so, the less he began to identify as an asexual. The people he met on the forums were not attracted to ANYONE, not even Johnny Depp. The entire idea of sex and physical intimacy was wholly unappealing to them, where Jade watched porn, thought about men, craved contact but rejected it when it was offered. He decided that unlike the asexual men he met, it wasn't a preference. It was a physical and mental hang up probably sprung from attachment and trust issues he had with his father, blah blah blah, all that psychotherapy bullshit, everyone's same old story. 

In conclusion, Jade wasn't asexual, he was merely a fucked up, untrusting and unrealistically selective gay man lacking in positive male role models, complete with less interest in sex that most other men he knew . This predicament was entirely more frustrating that asexuality, which at least was a nice little label you could type on a name tag and tape to your forehead, a clean word that tied up all the loose ends and wrapped everything in a safe, neutral colored package. It would have been easy to tell Mark, "Sorry, but I'm asexual," instead of, "Sorry, I'm ridiculously picky, have trust issues, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and I'm not particularly interested in sex unless its with Johnny Depp, and even then I'd just prefer to talk about art over coffee." It was social suicide in the gay world, or in any world, actually, to reveal to your peers that you'd rather have coffee with Johnny Depp than a blowjob. If a guy could get past all the personality disorders, good luck with that one.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

The next few days at Jade's new apartment were free of anything unusual. The lack of paranormal occurrences left him both bored and relieved, silently wishing something else would scare the shit out of him. Adam left a day ago, bringing with him his excited and jabbering tales of Emily and her oriental kink palace. The entire affair horrified Jade to an extent, Adam was a big on fish stories but Jade could tell when he was lying or embellishing. There was no way that cute little spunky Megan was into leather and whips like Adam said she was, but even though he had hardly met Emily, there was something about her that made Jade believe all of Adam's tales. The amazed stars that had taken up permanent residence in Adam's eyes were also clear indicators. 

Being alone was slightly harder than Jade remembered, especially when there wasn't an income. He found himself buying the cheapest, and therefore the most disgusting and unhealthy food he could find, mostly ninety nine cent six packs of beef flavored Top Ramen that gave him headaches from all the salt. He was able to find a crappy microwave and mini-fridge combo on Craigslist for cheap (David Marchand paid for it, anyway,) and once he worked up the nerve to return to the hardware store Mark worked at, acquired a washer and dryer set for free. In the process of loading these into Mark's pickup, he noted that the kid seemed to back off a little, keeping the overt flirtation to a minimum. Jade was relieved. Adam was not.

The appliances were fickle and didn't always do their job, but Jade was extremely grateful to have anything that cooked Top Ramen and washed his sheets. There were a few coffee shops, book stores, pharmacies, and grocery outlets currently processing his application, so he was bound to have a few jobs in rotation by the next week. Everything was going seemingly well, but Jade couldn't help feeling uneasy. He was unable to place the source of his inherent discomfort, the splinter feeling that poked covertly at his side like a hangnail, a sewing needle. It was unsettling, this holding pattern, as if he were waiting for something to happen. Anything. A mirror to break, a suitcase to move, and window to shut, a fuse to blow. 

Each morning after his scalding shower, he carefully examined the mirror, which he had since replaced to its original location over the sink. He was ashamed of his disappointment, but every morning the steam remained untouched like a new snow. Each morning he stood with a sinking feeling, wondering why whoever, or whatever had led him to the cash in the wall had grown mysteriously dormant. 

Nine a.m. Wednesday morning was no different. Jade took a hot shower, growing dizzy in the heat, his eyes fogging up with sharp static as he stumbled out, eagerly surveying the mirror for any messages. He felt alone, cast away, like someone took interest in him and abruptly lost it. He stared hard at the mirror, his reflection hazy and clouded, like he was gazing through a sheet of white tissue paper. Nothing changed. Jade rapped his knuckles against the mirror furiously, narrowing his eyes and looking trough his own image. "Is anyone there? Hey!" Of course, nothing responded. The steam meandered lazily. He felt remarkably stupid, sitting there talking to his mirror. 

"I don't care you can't spell. You should talk to me." he said abruptly, blocking out the image of his own dripping body addressing something imaginary in the walls so he wouldn't feel any more embarrassed than he already was. Once again, no response. He took a deep breath. It was a long shot, but if the first message led him to anything, it led him to this. The force in his mirror made the first move, and the ball was in his court now. The only thing he could think to do at this point was rash, impulsive...but bizarrely, in some universe where everyone was like Jade, made sense. He took his index finger, and just like last time, wrote in a neat row of letters, "D A V I D?" 

He then hobbled out, hopping on one foot and struggling with his falling bath towel. The rats could write him messages, but he wasn't about to let them see him naked. He tugged on a pair of tattered jeans and a nylon belt, opening his mini fridge in search of a water bottle. The fridge was dirt cheap for several reasons. One was that it did not possess a mini-freezer within it as some of the later models did, and another was that it was positively covered and trashed with a billion different skateboarding stickers and other various extreme sports logos. Jade knew nothing of such cultures, but he didn't mind the decorations . It added some color to his otherwise dimly lit and unfurnished kitchenette. 

Jade tried not to think about the mirror. He tried not to race back into the bathroom and see if his effort to communicate was answered. He knew this whole thing was ridiculous, that he was essentially talking to himself and his walls...but he hadn't started it. He wasn't sure who was in charge of this force, but regardless of whether it was a brilliant rodent or a very stupid ghost, it tried to talk to him, and everyone already thought Jade was crazy, so where was the harm in attempting to talk back? David Marchand seemed like a fair bet. After all, he _had_ been led to the ID. 

And that was another issue that factored into this whole saga: the ID, and David Marchand's quirky, knowing smile. He absolutely fascinated Jade, who often put himself to sleep by fantasizing about pasts, futures, and personalities that could belong to David Marchand, the life behind the drivers license the previous tenant had thoughtlessly left behind in his old apartment's wall. The license dated to the 1994, which meant Mr. Marchand probably moved out years ago, before the young couple who had sold the place to Jade moved in. Why did he hide his driver’s license? Was it a fake ID, stuffed into the wall with some emergency cash? What if David Marchand was the alter ego of some huge San Franciscan criminal? What if he was just careful? Why did he move out? Why did he forget such seemingly important belongings? Why was he so goddamn handsome? 

And most importantly, was David Marchand dead? Was the thing responsible for writing Jade’s name in the shower steam in any way linked to David Marchand, or was it just wishful thinking?

Jade couldn’t take the suspense anymore, so he calmly walked to the bathroom, using the excuse that he left his cell phone on the counter, pretending it was his only reason for the trip. When he entered, it felt as if the air had changed slightly, like the steam was not just something he could see, but an electric force he felt, that buzzed faintly in his ears. There was a sound Buffy’s speakers made his cell phone was near and receiving a call, a static singing noise. Jade could hear that sound, but fuller, more magnified, as if the apartment itself was reacting to the cell phone signals’ ether affair. He pocketed his mobile before he dare flip on the light and raise his gaze level with the mirror. 

When he finally gathered up the nerve to do so, the expanding bubble sensation in his chest jumped violently to his throat, and Jade’s windpipe constricted, his skin pricked to attention and an ecstatic shiver ran from the base of his spine to the crown of his head. For written on the mirror in the same childish scrawl were the five letters, plain as day, D A V E Y . 

~*~

Davey Marchand expanded triumphantly, savoring the sharp, painful warmth of being so close. And not just physically close, because once you’ve died, physicality is something you only dream about, something you remember but can no longer grasp. No, the closeness was not physical. It was ethereal, astral. They were officially close because before, they were unaware of each other’s existence. There were clues along the way, one way sightings, Davey looking at Jade through a window, Jade only seeing it as a mirror, Jade knowing he as there, but not placing a name to a feeling, a face to a name. But now, Jade knew. Jade knew Davey and Davey knew Jade. They had tried, made mistakes, failed...but now, they were properly introduced. 

The days prior had been spent hovering between the bedroom and here, following Jade, watching him with complete and total longing. Davey memorized his idiosyncrasies, the way Jade ran from his bedroom to the kitchen where he had the washing machine, carrying one article of clothing at a time to prolong the process. How he spent hours on his computer typing things, deleting things, and typing them again. He’d talk to himself for hours, talk to his new fridge, his mirror, his cell phone, his wallet. Davey’s old Drivers license. 

That seemed to be his favorite thing to talk to as of late. He knew Jade drank coffee, he took lots of medications, all labeled and measured out into a mint green plastic case that snapped and was adorned with the days of the week. Jade would take walks every day and sometimes come back with bags of food, once came back with a very clean man driving a truck lugging a washer and dryer; Davey had scared him away by slamming the door behind his retreating ass when he left. 

As the days went on, Davey felt himself becoming more and more of a _thing_ instead of an _idea._ Before Jade moved in, he could only move things, make himself visible to the outside world if he was feeling especially angry or excited about something. He could hardly remember anything from his previous life, how to write, how to spell, how to talk. Now moving from room to room was effortless, and what had felt like a pins and needles prickling before surrounding some shapeless core, that had turned into something else, something stronger. He sometimes caught sight of his own ectoplasm, sometimes remembered what his reflection looked like before he had died. 

Right now, Jade was looking at his own reflection in the foggy, polished glass, smiling kid-on - Christmas smile that made his eyes sparkle in childish wonder. His knuckles were white from grasping the edge of the fake marble counter. The prickling grew, shone, buzzed furiously and mechanically like a hive of wasps, stung like wasps too. Davey had never seen so clearly, felt so strong, not even when the last tenants lived here. The walls undulated, resounded around him like sound waves, radio waves, all the other things he was made out of and used as means of communication. Davey Marchand had reached a person on the other side, and he wasn’t giving up once he had come this far. 

~*~

Jade was on the brink of something huge. This was it. He was _excited_ about something, genuinely ecstatic and hopeful and _outside_ of his mind, the barren wasteland where things like fathers and nooses prowled looking for blood. Jade hadn’t thought about his father once, hadn’t wondered whether he should take the proper dose or the whole bright orange bottle of his sleeping pills each night before bed. At first he thought it was just this, just this name and this plastic card and this wry smile, and he was actually going totally crazy looking at the mirror every morning like it might open its eyes and talk to him. 

However, it _wasn’t_ just him. David...Davey Marchand was on the other end, the other line, the other side, and he was _talking back._ It had to be the coolest thing that had ever happened to Jade. This was IT, this was the cure to his writers block, his depression, his loneliness. There was _someone_ who was interested enough to contact him from wherever they were, trapped in a mirror, from a hole punched in the dry wall. An idea occurred to Jade now, as he stood marveling at the mirror, at Davey’s big sweeping “D.” he had no idea _where_ or _how_ Davey was contacting him. He didn’t know what Davey even was. 

All the signs pointed towards the supernatural, to a ghost. Jade assumed he was supposed to be frightened, considering that his new apartment was apparently haunted, but he could hardly muster any semblance of anxiety, let alone fear. He was _excited_ beyond all comprehension. He had seen Davey’s kind eyes and half smile, and seen nothing to be afraid of. Ghosts were ghosts, but it helped that he was a handsome ghost. 

“Davey?” He tentatively asked the air, feeling self-conscious and very aware that he was shirtless. The apartment was always cold regardless of the weather outside, but the bathroom was especially freezing right now despite his shower only minutes ago. His hair was standing at attention on the back of his neck and on top of his forearms. “How can I talk to you? Can you hear me? See me?” He felt increasingly stupid. 

The door swung violently shut, making the sliding plastic doors of the shower rattle on their tracks. Jade jumped, his hands trembling and heart, once again, beating rapid fire. “Uh, is that a yes?” he said quietly, swallowing a lump in his throat. The door slammed open again, thwacking painfully loud on its hinges. Jade flinched again and tightly shut his eyes, rethinking his statement about not being afraid. 

“Ok, ok. Got it. You can hear me. Can you make it uh, quieter? Loud noises make me jumpy.”   
The door carefully closed, as if a light gust of wind had barely pushed it. Jade laughed disbelievingly at the whole thing, grabbing fistfuls of his hair and looking wildly around him. “This is so amazing...seriously, this is the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me. Ever.” 

Jade scooted up to the mirror, looking at it hard with narrowed eyes. Then he lifted a hand once more and wrote, “thanks,” and waited for a response. It was silent in the bathroom for a few breaths, and Jade could hear his own frantic heart beat. Then, right below the name inscribed on the mirror, a handprint appeared, as if a man had pressed his palm longingly to a window pane. Jade stared at it, palpitating heart and all, and made himself raise his sweating left hand, and press it to the print, gasping at how cold it felt beneath his hesitant touch. 

Davey’s hand was smaller than his own, more delicate, and Jade thought if it didn’t belong to dead person, he could fold it within his own, curling his fingers into a fist and never letting go. 

Jade held his breath, and for a moment, he thought his startled white reflection in the fogged up mirror changed into the face from the drivers license, the high cheekbones, strong jaw, gentle eyes. Davey Marchand smiled quirkily, lips cocked into a twisted but genuine happiness. The moment was gone and it was just Jade, just Jade with his nose practically touching the mirror, his hand hurting slightly because the glass was so shockingly cold, like a slab of dry ice smoking insidiously. He carefully took it away, rubbing the pads of his frost bitten fingers against the fabric of his pants. 

“So, uh, how can I talk to you? How can you talk back? Can you say anything? The steam's mostly gone on the mirror...wait." Jade said, holding up his finger and racing into the bedroom, ransacking his laptop briefcase for a notebook. He kept a number of tiny spiral bound notebooks on him in case inspiration struck unexpectedly, and he frantically ripped a page from one of the many, ripping a chewed pen out of the inside pocket before tearing back into the bathroom. "Davey?" Jade asked, feeling silly for saying the name aloud, for essentially talking to himself. He held the paper tight to the counter, hunched over it with shaking fingers. He etched a tentative "Hello?" in black ink, his letters appearing anxious and unsure. His breath shown in excited blooms puffing from his parted mouth. Staring hard at the paper, he prayed to anyone who'd listen. It remained stubbornly blank. 

"Okay, so that doesn't work...are you still there?" Jade asked the space around him, still cold but less prickling. Something had shifted, like the air in the bathroom was getting sucked into mysterious, unseen black hole. He whipped his head around him, backing into the counter. "Hello?" All the electricity, all the tension and static that made his hair stand up and his feet shock against the bathmat and his laptop speakers sing even though there was no cell phone activity nearby, all of that was replaced with silence. Vacancy. 

Davey was in his bathroom mere minutes ago, and now he was gone. The gooseflesh that drew the tiny hairs of Jade's arm into an stiff attention stance disappeared along with the cold, the humming. "Are you there?" Jade asked nervously, knowing full well that Davey wasn't. Of course, no doors slammed, no messages appeared on the mirror. 

Disappointment swelled and popped in his chest, making his stomach drop sickly into the hollow of his abdomen and settling there like food poisoning, like too many sleeping pills swallowed with lead paint. Jade slammed his fist down on the counter, letting the frustration and confusion course through him. It felt horrible to be so furious, but fury was better than emptiness, that disappointment. "What the fuck, where did you go? why did you do that? selfish bastard." He muttered, stalking out of the bathroom feeling as idiotic and shirtless as ever, his ears and cheeks burning. 

Sometimes Jade treated his depression with starving himself, sometimes he slept for hours and took a new sleeping pill every time he woke up, swallowing the dosage before he even had the opportunity to remember what was causing the disease of utmost misery. They were all methods that worked for a short amount of time.

This time, however, despite the fact that Jade was gut wrenchingly frustrated, he didn't grab his sleeping pills. Instead he grabbed Buffy, aggressively plugged her into the wall via his new phone cable, checked his inbox, opened a word processor, and furiously typed away until the tips of his fingers were pink and sore with the force of his need to expel words. It had been a long time since his used his anger and self deprecation constructively, a long time since he channeled his emotions to create, to write. So even if he wasn’t thrilled about the inconsistent haunting he seemed to be dealing with, he had to thank said ghost for shaking a good story out of him.


	4. Chapter 4

Jade’s eyes started to droop, burning faintly with the effort it took to keep them trained on a glaring white screen for so long. He saved his document and closed the word processor, almost startled by his familiar desktop background materializing. He didn’t know exactly what he had written, or if it was any good, but the fact that he had actually written all that without deleting half of it or obsessing over whether or not it was perfect was enough for him to feel satisfied. 

Mutely satisfied perhaps, seeing as he didn’t trust himself to feel anything positive without it being vaguely mute first out of fear. But still, Jade was satisfied. He sighed, raking a stiff hand through his hair, opening his web browser. Instead of automatically checking his inbox, which was all he really did online anymore, he opened a search engine, unconsciously holding his breath while he typed “obituary ,David Marchand.” 

Several results popped up, it was a common enough name, he supposed. He narrowed the search to “San Francisco,” which dwindled the hits considerably. He clicked on one, his gut twisting with nerves and the residual excitement of the day’s prior events as he read the neat, times new roman newspaper scan. It wasn’t an obituary, but an article featuring a grisly looking car crash. 

_A black Honda Accord was discovered Saturday morning, demolished by a train heading eastbound on the San Francisco/San Jose Railroad. The body behind the wheel is believed to be the deceased David Marchand, San Francisco local. Details have yet to be released on the nature of the crash._

Jade’s eyes flitted across the screen, the faintest hope bubbling in his chest. Train tracks. That struck him as strange, not because it was an unlikely and gruesome way to go by normal standards, but because it was something he’d considered at his worst days in Burbank, the days he stopped taking his medication because the effort of opening the bottle was too overwhelming to comprehend. He remembered a long time ago when a neighbor of his had run over Adam’s stupid fat cat he inherited from a since long dumped girlfriend. 

Adam has been staying with him for moral support and he brought the thing, this fluffy lump of useless grey fuzz. Apparently it got out and this guy who lived near Jade hit it in his Jeep a good three or four blocks up. guilty, the man had put the cat’ remains in a paper bag and walked door to door apologizing to strangers before finally locating the correct owner, who was of course the more-relieved-and-less-distraught-than-expected Adam. Jade’s neighbor explained that he used to have a friend who lost a dog on the railroad tracks in Monrovia, out east, and a homeless man found the tags that were on its collar and spent years traveling around the tracks asking people if it was their dog. When he finally found the owner of the deceased dog, it brought closure, and Jade’ neighbor said that stuck with him, and felt responsible to own up to killing Adam’s stupid ex’s stupid cat or whatever. 

Jade liked this story, it was one of the few things that stuck with him from his last major depressive episode. He didn’t remember a lot from this time in his life, but he remembered the homeless guy and the dog tags, he remembered his neighbor with Adam’s dead cat in that brown paper garbage bag. He remembered the thought behind all of this, and every time anyone in his life mentioned railroad tracks casually, he thought about it. He had considered railroad tracks on his worst days, and maybe Davey Marchand had not only considered them, but decided upon them on his worst days. Jade pondered this and it made him sad, sad and worried for someone who was already dead, which didn’t make any sense at all, but neither did anything else that happened in this apartment, so Jade didn’t feel too bad about it. 

He thought of Davey Marchand parked in his car, (which in Jade’s mind, was Donna, her white, paint chipped iron sides heaving like she was breathing) on the train tracks in the monrovia, and he thought of his ID like a dog tag, hidden his walls. And Jade pictured himself going door to door, and for once not giving up. Jade sighed, closing the internet window before re opening the word document he’d started earlier, cracking his stiff knuckled and ignoring how tired he was, beginning to read over what poured out of him unrestrained, images of endless railroad tracks with no destination sprawling on either side of him, and a knowing smile and a big, sweeping D in condensation drifting through his mind’s eye. 

~*~

After a late morning filled with the same voracious writing as the night prior, Jade was showering when that goddamn window decided to slam again. He stood stock still and scared in the shower spray for a few seconds before quickly shutting the water off and toweling himself dry, cursing as he tried to tell himself it was nothing paranormal and more likely a breeze, and therefore getting his hopes up was futile.

It didn’t work; his heart was still pounding with a lethal combination of nerves and excitement. Sidestepping out of the bathroom proved to be harder than it should have been, and between looking shiftily over his shoulder every five seconds and inching out of the door frame, he made little progress. He figured this was because he was partially fearing both where he was coming from and where he was going to end up. 

He was tired and unsettled from his creative outburst, making the process all the more painstaking. Whenever Jade had a particularly productive writing session, he came our of it in a particular state, usually off his guard and very introspective. Adam liked to refer to it as his “thinky” place. 

Sometimes, when Jade was still writing here and there before shit got really bad, Adam would come over and find dishes piling out of the sink and no clean laundry for Jade to wear, while Jade ran around manically typing things and transcribing his jotted margin notes. “Where the hell are you, dude?” Adam would ask, waving his hand in front of Jade’s face. “In my head...” Was the usual response, uttered in a disconnected voice while he pondered the true meaning of the word _sublime_. “You’re thinky today. I don’t like it.” Adam would explain, demonstrating his uncanny ability to create and use words that weren’t in the dictionary, but often said _exactly_ what Adam wanted to say. 

He was thinky right now, as he took his sweet time investigating the window phenomena. In fact, he might be dangerously close to the realm of what he assumed Adam would undoubtably call “overthinky.” 

Jade was about to take a deep breath, shake his overthinky self into gear and start walking like a normal person to the recently shut window when he came face to face with a very solid looking human being standing smack dab in the middle of his kitchen. He panicked, slamming backwards and knocking his mini fridge off of the built in cutting board. It fell to the ground with an alarming thump and clatter noise, which only made Jade panic more. 

" GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE!" He yelled, stumbling to where the silverware drawer had been in his old, Burbank apartment, forgetting that his current flatware collection consisted entirely of plastic sporks he picked up in bulk from the local discount grocery store. The man in his kitchen was shorter than him and thin, but it was the sort of thin that consisted entirely of muscle. He was tough looking, but weirdly feminine, despite his harsh facial bone structure that struck Jade as being so familiar, so unable to place...

"Your house, this is my house." The man said incredulously, looking very serious aside from the tiny, nondescript half smile that barely touched his mouth but was all over his dark, sparkling eyes. The recognition suddenly, powerfully hit Jade. It was way too much to take and he crumpled to the floor because his legs literally turned the exact consistency of jelly, not quite fainting but wishing that he had. He defensively cradled his head in his hands, eyes shut tightly. There was a painfully attractive dead man standing in his kitchen, and he didn't know quite what to do about it. It wasn’t the sort of situation anything in his life had prepared him for. 

"Christ Jade, relax, I'm not going to...oh god..." Davey started to say to Jade, who was currently in a ball on the floor muttering, knees tight to his chest. Jade watched Davey Marchand drop gracelessly to his knees so he was at Jade's eye level, and the fucking gracelessness of it actually made him look graceful and Jade was just bowled over by that awful observation, by everything, by the simple sharp fact of it: Jade should have been thinking something else, anything else, anything practical like, _there's a ghost talking to me in my kitchen, or I'm going insane again..._ but that wasn't what Jade was thinking. Davey Marchand was down on his knees next to him, solid as any live person if not a little pale, looking _concerned_ of all things and Jade was thinking _passion_ for the first time in his life. Jade was thinking lust. 

"You're _solid!"_ Jade choked out, scrambling away from Davey's crouching form because he didn't know how to deal with the bright green flashing bulbs of this new, miraculous YES sign that appeared without warning that he’d never seen in his goddamn life, not even when he watched Benny and Joon for the first time and realized Johnny Depp was hot shit. 

"Well yeah, I guess, it's not like the movies." Davey said, which didn't even make sense to Jade but whatever. He couldn't believe this. He felt his head getting lighter and lighter, like Davey's unwarranted appearance made all its substantial gray matter leak out his ears and now he was going to faint, conk out on his kitchen floor and Davey would have to give him mouth to mouth from the afterlife and that would _really_ be interesting. 

"I'm gonna pass out..." Jade started to say when the tunnel vision crept up, closing in alarmingly. Davey leapt to him, hands outstretched and when they came into contact with Jade's cheek he snapped out of it right away, thrashing away yelping because it _hurt_ , those hands were _so cold_. It was as if five pin pricks of dry ice burnt into Jade's unaware cheeks, shocking him into labored breath and quickened heart rate. And it wasn’t as if Davey just touched Jade, he went _through him_ , fingers not stopping to merely rest on the tender, warm skin there but sinking beneath it, that awful cold physically infiltrating Jade’s flesh. The sensation made his stomach turn and wrench away in pain, but at the same time the sensation, like any sensation, made Jade want more. It made him want to hold on. 

"sorry, sorry, sorry." Davey said hurriedly, shuffling over to where Jade now lay, clutching his face and gasping.   
“No, it’s fine,” Jade managed, even though it wasn’t. Ghosts weren’t fine, Jade knew he was supposed to care about that, but he quite frankly didn’t. He didn’t care about anything aside from the fact that he might not be asexual, and he might not even be Johnny Depsexual, and it was taking someone who might have parked their own car on the _train tracks_ to lead him to his epiphany. Someone who literally hurt to touch. This was going to prove difficult in the future, Jade suspected, but for now it was glaring and obvious and wonderful. 

His eyes swept Davey’s form hungrily, trying to drink the image in before he disappeared again, reduced to steam on a mirror and radio waves. “You don’t look like your ID picture,” Jade blurted stupidly when he regained control of his voice. A look of more-than-mild amusement flooded Davey’s overwhelmingly real features. 

“Come on. Who does?” Davey responded, and Jade laughed, half-aware of the way his hands were shaking violently, the way his body was awash in freezing air just from proximity. 

“Yeah, yeah I guess you’re right,” Jade muttered, tearing his eyes away from Davey to stare at the floor and make sure it was still underneath him. “How...the fuck did you become...how did you go from yesterday to _today?”_ He asked, studying Davey again. He was beginning to realize that although Davey’s image was certainly _solid_ , as in not transparent, it wasn’t entirely _human._

There was this weird, electric quality about him, like he was made out of barely humming static, like his edges were fuzzy and pixilated like a picture on a television. But not quite. What was even more subtle and confusing about this was that it came and went; one second Davey was a real dude crouched in Jade’s tiny kitchen, and the next he was just an TV picture of one minus the screen. It was disconcerting, but not in an entirely unpleasant way. 

“I don’t know. I am trying all the time to be like this, and sometimes it’s so easy to do _anything_ , and other times I push and push and push and nothing at all happens,” Davey explained. There was something indescribably odd about the way he spoke, almost like there was a tiny lag to his words and his motion, like a web-cam with a bad connection. It made Jade was to kiss him, and he knew this was entirely the wrong thing to feel about such an oddity. 

Even stranger was that the second Jade picked up on the speech-lag, it a disappeared and Davey was talking normally, as real as anything Jade had ever seen. 

“Weird,” Jade said anticlimactically. “Are you...things are easy right now?” He asked dumbly. Davey stood up, holding those narrow hands out and examining them. 

“Obviously,” he answered. Jade struggled to his feet, not trusting his legs one fucking bit. 

“I have no idea why, though,” Davey continued, reaching out and putting his hand through the counter, moving it back and forth experimentally. After a few seconds, he could rest it on the surface without going through it. He smiled triumphantly. “I’m sort of new to this whole being here for real business, too.” He added. He kept on swaying a little towards Jade, like he wanted to touch him but knew he couldn’t, knew that he’d push right through Jade and inside of him, knew that it would hurt. Jade could sense this but he almost didn’t mind, almost wanted it.

“Why did you leave yesterday?” He couldn’t help asking, swaying back and making the space between them weirdly minimal. It was a breed of minimal that would’t be socially acceptable with someone alive that he’d just met, but he supposed normal social courtesies didn’t apply to ghosts. After all Davey literally appeared in his house without warning multiple times, frequently when he was in the shower, and that certainly wasn’t acceptable etiquette by living-people standards. 

“I didn’t mean to. I just couldn’t push anymore, it stopped working,” Davey shrugged, dark brows jolting up in a look of confusion. Jade studied Davey’s face and tried to memorize it, the mole on the right side of his mouth, the creases on either side of his eyes from laughing. It was all so incomprehensible, all so fucking _real_. Jade’s skin was prickled up into gooseflesh, and said without thinking, “Jesus, you’re so _cold_ ,” voice barely above a mumble. Unexpectedly Davey flinched away, guilt or embarrassment or something to that effect coursing across his face. 

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to do that either. I’m _dead_ , you know,” He said hurriedly and Jade’s eyes flew open wider, heart beginning to rabbit nervously. Ok, so ghosts were self conscious about their temperature or something. That was okay, he could remember that. “It’s fine, I don’t mind. It’s interesting,” Jade said frantically. Davey eyes him with suspicion, this searching look that dug so deep it hurt worse that his dead fingers on Jade’s cheek, but in the same, good, aching, invasive way. Davey didn’t say anything, so Jade did. 

“Is there a risk of you disappearing any second? And can we move to my bed? I need to sit down and it’s kind of the only furniture to sit down on that I have,” He added sheepishly. Davey nodded, holding his his heavily tattooed arm in a _lead the way_ kind of fashion. Jade did so, mistrustful of his jellied legs. His heart hammered but less threateningly now, and he collapsed onto the bed, Davey following suit and making no indentation on the mattress, even though Jade most definitely did despite his less substantial stature. It was the weirdest things that were making Jade want to badly to touch Davey Marchand, like the fact he didn’t dent the mattress and had a mole next to his mouth. 

“To answer your question,” Davey started, bending his head to the side in this way that made his black hair hang to his lap, sweeping it just ever so slightly, curling at the ends. Jade knew that if he reached out and touched it like he wanted it to, his hand would go right through the cascade like it were made of ice water. “I could disappear at any time, I suppose, but I don’t think I will right now. I can kind of tell because I start to feel it, and I’m not feeling it right now. I think it has something to do with you, actually.” He added, eyes twinkling. 

“Me? What do you mean?” Jade asked sharply. He ran a hand through his hair, suddenly self conscious over how he must look, flushed and nervous as fuck from Davey’s visit. When he was just hanging out in his house showering or whatever, it wasn’t like he was attempting to maintain his attractiveness. Sudden visits meant Davey could catch him unawares, unprepared, at any time. Essentially, looking like shit. 

“When you write, I mean. It makes things easier,” Davey explained, gesturing to Buffy, which was plugged into the phone jack and resting on Jade’s sorry excuse for a bedside table. Jade stared at Davey, brow creased with worry. 

“When I write? Like...wait...what if you’re a character I brought to life or something?” He mused aloud without thinking about the logistics. Davey’s face morphed into an affronted look, eyebrows knitting together and mouth parting. “I beg your pardon?! You definitely did not create me, dude, I was a real person who lived and died, alright? Jeez.” Davey barked, but there was laughter dancing in his eyes, reminding Jade of the way sun reflected off of a surface of water and made it look warm, bright. 

“Okay, sorry. That was megalomaniacal of me.” Jade admitted, trying not to smile but doing so anyway, wringing his hands in his lap and willing them to stop the ever-present tremble. 

“Big words,” Davey sighed, leaning back on the bed. “But seriously, when you write I get stronger. I think it has to do with energy and humanity and other new wave bull shit. I dunno,” He said, shrugging. “I mean I didn’t exist at all until you moved in. I don’t think ghosts can haunt unless there’s someone _to_ haunt, you know?” Davey said. Jade thought about it, thinking about some obscure fact he read somewhere that ghosts never haunted graveyards, contrary to popular belief. They couldn’t, because there was no human energy to feed off of. He figured the same rules applied here. “So when I put positive energy into something, it makes you stronger?”

“Something like that. Hell, that’s as good a reason as ever to improve upon your mental health, right?” Davey said, his voice implying that he had some kind of prior knowledge concerning Jade’s mental health, (or lack thereof), at all. Jade figured after a moment of vaguely self-conscious contemplation that of course Davey knew that; he probably knew _everything_ about Jade. He lived in his house. 

“Well yeah. I can force myself to sit down and write a few pages a night if it means I’ll have company,” Jade said, feeling weirdly exposed. Davey’s proximity had his teeth nearly chattering with cold, but in spite of that he felt his cheeks color, getting hotter. 

“Mm, a haunting as company? You must be a lonely man, Jade Puget.” Davey said, crossing his arms. 

“Is that what you’re doing? Haunting me?” Jade asked. His voice came out oddly low, oddly suggestive. If he was familiar with the concept of flirting (which he wasn’t, under normal circumstances) he might have recognized it in his own tone. His heart still pounded, fingertips tingling and damp with sweat. He desperately wanted Davey to answer, eyes fixed on his cracking, electrified image. On the mole next to his mouth. 

“Well, this was my house before it was yours,” Davey said, equally low. Jade’s stomach dropped as his heart rose, choking up into his nervously swallowing throat and lodging there with the promise of permanent residence. Their eyes locked on each other, loaded and crackling and full of promise. 

“You’re welcome to stay, you know. And haunt me.” Jade added, mouth dry. Davey’s eyes did that smile, the one from his ID, and Jade realized that he might not have recovered as well as he thought from being crazy, but he didn’t exactly care. He was feeling, more than he had in months, years. 

“I intend to,” Davey answered, and his mouth reached the smile in his eyes.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I guess I should just forewarn that my baseball knowledge is limited to baseball fanfiction. I read slash about Barry Zito, but have little to no appreciation for the game..so if I mess up my facts, that would be why. Anyway, enjoy!

The next couple of days, Davey and Jade happily coexisted as room mates, perhaps even friends. If it wasn’t so fucking weird that Davey was dead, it might have been the most normal, easygoing human interaction Jade had ever had outside of Adam. All his social awkwardness, all his asexuality or greysexuality or whatever the fuck it was seemed entirely secondary to the fact Davey was an apparition. Jade woke up ( bedded down in a new comforter he bought at Target and several sweatshirts, after all the apartment was always uncomfortably _cold_ now) and ate breakfast in his kitchen alongside Davey, got dressed for work, and said good bye. 

He returned not to an empty apartment, but someone eagerly awaiting his return, like that dog his parents used to have who’d wag its bottom half almost clear off its body every times his mom came back from PTA meetings. It would wait on the couch, whimpering until she arrived home, and then it would wiggle around the house barking elatedly. 

Davey didn’t wag or bark, but his face would light up the minute Jade walked in the door and tossed his keys on the counter with a metallic clink. Jade could visibly observe Davey’s faded, almost-transparent form begin to solidify as he entered the room, a projection from a TV screen becoming what looked like a flesh and blood human standing in his apartment. That was the wonderful thing about befriending a ghost; Jade could see all of his emotions and feelings right there on his sleeve, apparent in his translucency or lack thereof. Jade had issues reading most people on most days, but reading Davey hadn’t proved difficult in the least. 

Although it was Davey whose physical appearance altered the minute Jade returned to the apartment, Jade was probably visibly excited about the whole thing, glowing in some sense of the word, too. It felt so fucking good to not be alone, to have someone who waited for him, depended upon him, truly and wholeheartedly did not only enjoy his company, but literally _thrived_ on it. He found himself getting all nervous and giddy on the walks back from his book store job, which he’d managed to secure for some of the week days, when he wasn’t sorting donations at the vintage clothing store on Wednesdays and Fridays. 

Upon coming back to the apartment (Which Jade was beginning to refer to in his mind as home) in the evening, Davey and Jade would engage in heated conversation about everything they could think of, anything the other would listen to. At first, Davey had been amusingly ignorant to all that happened in the years following his death and preceding his haunting, and Jade had to spend an entire dinner debriefing him on which celebrities had died, who was dating who, whose career had ended, and which stupid blonde starlet had dropped her mediocre acting job to pursue even more mediocre, if not utterly terrible singing career. Then there was the entire travesty of the Oakland As, whom Davey had apparently loved in his lifetime and now had a new lineup. 

“Why did they trade Zito?! He was their best player!” Davey had wailed across the kitchen counter, which Jade was currently eating a bowl of top Ramen off of, wearing PJs underneath a series of sweaters and a scarf. He looked like he was about to go out in the snow.

“Apparently not anymore. Apparently now he’s really bad...” Jade announced, scrolling through the wikipedia page he had open. Jade didn’t give two shits about baseball, but he’d since learned that Davey was very serious about his teams. Despite having lived and died in San Francisco, apparently Davey grew up in East Bay, hence his preference of the Athletics in favor of the Giants, whom favorite player Barry Zito was currently pitching for. According to Davey, this was a gigantic tragedy, seeing as the Giants and the As were mortal rivals. This was all news to Jade, who’d seen maybe two Dodger games the summer he was eleven and played little league until he broke his elbow, which incidentally ended his baseball career for life. 

“God, such a shame. This goes in the category of awful with Britney Spears getting unsexy and Anna Nicole and Billy Mays dying,” Davey declared through his hands, which were spread across his face and miserable expression, which was twisted at Barry Zito’s newfound lack of pitching talent. Jade snorted, twirling a considerable bite full of noodles around his plastic spork. Of all the celebrity deaths that had occurred in the last few years, Davey was most broken up about Billy Mays and Anna Nicole, instead of the presumed MJ. Jade found this incredibly endearing. 

“Didn’t you haunt the last family who lived here? How come you didn’t learn anything from them, did they not leave tabloids lying around or something?” Jade asked. Davey shook his head, wrinkling his nose in response. He was miraculously clear right now, the web-cam like lag he sometimes got completely gone. It was moments like these that made Jade forget Davey was a ghost, and not his just a guy, his friend. Or he supposed he _was_ his friend, just not his alive friend. It was depressing, made Jade’s viscera clench with a sad, far away longing. 

“Well, I didn’t exactly have conversations with them over dinner; they weren’t the nicest couple. Not hospitable and handsome like you,” Davey said with a sly smile, wisps of dark hair framing his face. He wore his hair down more often than not now, saying he liked the way the static felt swishing around him. Jade wasn’t a ghost and therefore didn’t entirely understand the nuances of ectoplasm, but he took his word for it and didn’t ask questions. After all, he loved the way Davey’s hair looked down, dark and heavy and almost real enough to reach out and grab a handful of.

“But they had to have a TV. Anna Nicole was all over the fuckin news, dude. You couldn’t escape her.” Jade argued, cocking his head, which throbbed slightly from the MSG in his cheap, too salty instant soup. He pushed it aside, grimacing. He really needed to start buying oatmeal instead.

“This is San Francisco, Jade. They didn’t have a TV, they were all into natural hippy shit. Plus, I couldn’t haunt them like I’m haunting you...I never got this solid. It was all slamming doors and mirror writing for those guys,” he explained, threading his elegant fingers through a handful of hair. “Now, tell me more. What TV series are still running? Has weed been legalized yet?” 

They’d spend the evenings going on like this, carrying out perfectly normal conversations until Jade left to pad dejectedly off to his night job, which the nine to two am shift at the 7-11 on the corner. Jade positively abhorred this particular job, seeing as his co workers consisted of a tall Indian guy in a turban who Jade couldn’t understand for the life of him, and this acne-crippled teenager who spent the majority of his shift slumped behind the counter with a Penthouse, smacking mouthful after mouthful of Big Chew that he never paid for. Jade was sure he was related to the manager or something, because only nepotism would result in such a lazy piece of shit being hired anywhere. 

“You better leave, you’re gonna be late,” Davey moped after Jade finished washing the remaining contents of his soup bowl down the drain with a pained face, tongue pressed to the backs of his teeth. 

“Ugh, I know. I fuckin’ hate this job, seriously. I mean, it pays the bills but honestly they should fire that ungrateful kid and give me his hours. I can’t believe he gets the same salary as me for beating off and stealing merchandise,” Jade bitched colorfully, stripping off one of his outer layers and the purple scarf he’d been donning indoors as of late. He figured this had been the only time he could remember where he took _off_ his jacket to go out. 

“You should bring him home and let me freak him out.” Davey said, smiling. “You know, bring out the old ghosty tricks.” Jade rolled his eyes, drying off the plastic bowl and setting it in the makeshift drying rack. “That’s illegal, dude. The kid’s like seventeen.” 

Davey watched him with huge dark eyes, hands on his hips and grey-white tee shirt hanging from his broad shoulders, tenting over where his torso narrowed. Jade’s eyes burned as he looked at him, stinging faintly in the corners. He realized then that he’d been staring, and blinked deliberately, wetting his lips with a darting, nervous tongue. “I wish you could come with me,” He mumbled to Davey, tugging his blonde bangs down across one eye and hiding behind them. 

“Dude, I wish I could too. It sucks being stuck in this empty house fading in and out of existence while you get to sell condoms and slurpees. Too bad I’m tethered to the apartment...otherwise I’d be following your sweet ass everywhere,” Davey said with a wink. A spreading warmth erupted in Jade’s stomach, makings itself itchy and apparent on his cheeks and neck. 

This haunting business had proved quite interesting, and it was entirely because Davey was always saying shit like that. _Flirting_. Jade didn’t know how to react to it from a living person, let alone a dead one, so he’d sort of made do thus far by blushing a lot and shuffling his feet. That’s not to say he didn’t appreciate it. He certainly did. He just wasn’t sure what the protocol response to such a thing was. 

He rubbed the back of his newly heated neck, smiling up at Davey through his hair. “Well, try to stay solid until I come back. I can leave the Oakland A’s article up for you if you want,” He offered, finding the page on Buffy and turning it around so it faced Davey, whose lips had formed this thin, unreadable, sly shape, eyes slitted and soft around the edges. Jade swallowed, elated deep in his gut in ways he’d never experienced before, this whole score of new and exciting bodily reactions Davey caused in him. He ducked down then, tugging on and lacing his grey converse; he was glad to have his eyes trained on something aside from the ghost in his kitchen. 

“Mmhm, that sounds masochistic...” Davey grumbled, hoisting himself up on the counter. He’d gotten better at not falling through furniture, separating his energy from that of solid objects in the room and using them to support himself like any normal living person would do. Still, every once and awhile he’d be sitting on the foot of the air mattress while they talked one second, and the next he’d be floundering halfway through the floor cursing. Jade had yet to get used to this, just laugh it off instead of freeze up over how weird all this shit was. 

“Alright, see you when I get off,” Jade said, standing upright and pocketing his keys and wallet. Davey nodded to him with a fleeting _ok_ , full attention otherwise fixed on Buffy, brow knit. Jade watched him for a too-long moment, his concentrated expression and dark eyes. They’d been living with each other for a good four days now, spending every waking second in each other’s company. Still, Jade hadn’t gotten over how fucking _handsome_ Davey was. How all the stuff they said in songs and poems and romantic comedies about butterflies in the stomach and dry mouths and feeling like you’re falling were horribly true. 

Jade shook his head, tearing his eyes away. He found his hand outstretched, mere inches away from brushing gently against the back of Davey’s head in an affectionate goodbye. He snatched his hands back, stomach twisting. Even if Davey wasn’t impossible to touch, Jade wasn’t entirely sure _he_ was capable yet, of touching someone. Of willingly closing those few inches between his own warm skin and Davey’s ectoplasm. 

But he _wanted_ to. And that was something. And as Jade left and locked the door behind him, he still felt like he was falling. 

~*~

Jade arrived back home in a terrible mood. Adam called him on his break to deliver the quite unfortunate news that Hunter, the junkie Jade dated a year or so ago, had recently tried to get in contact with Adam in efforts to get in contact with Jade. Adam told him to fuck off, thinking he might need money for using or something. It wasn’t like Hunter had been a particularly prominent or important person in Jade’s life, but still the notion of ghosts of his past popping their heads up and coming out of the woodwork irked him on a gut level, made him feel invaded and out of his own skin. It was interesting how the real ghosts didn’t bother him a bit. 

He figured that Hunter’s persistent attempts at reconnecting to Jade disturbed him because Hunter was a figment of his old life, or Burbank and North Hollywood and the difficult to remember, sinking-below-existence days of Jade’s last major depressive episode. Moving to San Francisco was his blank page, starting over. Free of all those poison LA streets, those poison LA people, all the carcinogens that sunk their teeth into him and held him down, steadfast and bound to the pollution and the traffic and the railroad tracks.

San Francisco may have been an unlikely, impractical place, but the high livings costs were _part_ of why he moved there. It wasn’t just to be in a city his father hadn’t touched with his bastard seed, it was to keep motivated. He couldn’t slip under the surface and sink, drowning in all the mundane, slave-to-the-grind mentalities that ran places like Burbank...he _had_ to keep on top of his shit, on top of his meds if he was living somewhere like San Francisco. He used to be able to let his rent go at his last apartment, but here he was forced to support himself. Support Davey. After all, it wasn’t just _his_ apartment anymore. 

Hunter, among the other people who dragged him down or negatively effected him in Burbank...they weren’t welcome in his new life, these blots of ink on a bright, blank expanse of white paper. Though the Hunter mention was only a brief interlude in his conversation with Adam, (which predominantly covered Jade’s new jobs and Adam’s new sex positions,) he was still deeply affected by it. He was also deeply affected by his own choice to not detail the haunting situation, which was inarguably the newest and most exciting development in Jade’s new and exciting life, and pretty much the only thing Jade thought about and therefore wanted to talk about. Adam asked him about any new friends, if he’d managed to find a boyfriend, if he’d called Mark back. 

Jade had paused, thinking with fierce concentration on how he could possibly explain to Adam that the literate rats in his house were actually a ridiculously attractive, baseball and Billy May’s loving ghost, who was not only fully and actively haunting him now, but had become his only friend in the city. He didn’t think this would go over well with Adam if explained in honesty, especially coming from a notoriously medicated whack job like Jade. Instead of explaining that he’d befriended the handsome as fuck specter who was sharing his living space, Jade told Adam without keeping the smile from tainting his voice, “I made a friend. Not a boyfriend, but we’ll see where it goes.” 

He internally smacked himself for that one, because seriously, _we’ll see where it goes?!_ Even if Jade _didn’t_ have problems with sex and relationships, and even if Davey was mutually as interested and all those flirtatious, teasing comments were more than just the product of friendliness and functioning social skills...it wouldn’t work out. Because Davey was dead, and Jade was not, and they couldn’t even _touch_ much less kiss or fuck of whatever else people normally did when they were boyfriends. 

None of this mattered to Adam, however, who didn’t know the whole story and just crowed jovially and smacked his knee loud enough for Jade to hear through the phone. He affectionately called him Jaderade a few times after that , and assured him that he _knew_ all along his sex drive wasn’t broken and just required the right dude. Jade found this all incredibly, perturbingly ironic, seeing as maybe it _did_ take the right dude, the right dude just happened to be one he couldn’t fucking _touch_ or even _see_ some of the times. It was just like Jade to become romantically interested in a ghost, after having an entire history devoid of romantic interest all together. On top of being crazy, this was all a really winning combination for success. 

Needless to say, as the conversation ended, Jade was huffy and put off. If Hunter poking his drug-addicted nose all up in Jade’s life again and Adam inadvertently exploiting that all of Jade’s sexual pursuits would inevitably end in failure wasn’t enough to force him into a bad mood, Adam had also insisted that he visit Jade soon so he could meet his new friend. This provided several problems, the most pressing being that Jade could not introduce Adam to Davey without explaining that he was a dead. 

Seeing as Adam was always looking for a red flag that Jade was about to go plunging off the deep end and stop taking his meds again or fling himself off the golden gate bridge or whatever, ghost business certainly wouldn’t do anything to support Jade’s argument that he was in better mental health and therefore capable of living on his own again. 

Jade sulked home, trumping up the stairs and unlocking the door before sidling inside and collapsing on his air mattress, which let out of huff as his weight impacted it. 

“Mmm, Acne and Turban make you clean up the puke in the bathroom again?” Davey asked in s staticy voice, and Jade felt his freezing cold presence come drifting towards him, alighting upon the mattress and making his skin crawl, the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He shivered, but it wasn’t an entirely bad shiver. 

“Mmgh nah, they were okay. Just other shit,” he said with a tired sigh, rolling over onto his back and curling into his comforter. He kicked off his shoes without looking at them, eyes instead fixed on Davey, who was flickering all over the place like the digital representation of the Red Queen in _Resident Evil_. It was almost like his body was changing channels, or was trying to find a good signal. “Adam called.”

“Isn’t that good? Isn’t he your friend?” Davey asked, mouth moving seconds faster than the sound was actually coming out of him, static sounding and lightly crackling. When Davey got like this is freaked Jade out, made him feel like he was trying to keep water in his palms fruitlessly. This frantic, fleeting, escaping feeling. 

“Yeah, he is...and I mean it was good to hear from him, but he just told me some shit I didn’t want to hear. Like, my ex-boyfriend has apparently been trying to get ahold of me, and Adam’s been making sure it doesn’t happen , but still...” Jade trailed off, sort of struck dumb by the way Davey’s image bristled visibly at the mention of an _ex boyfriend_ , Buffy’s speakers making that crackling, electronic cell-phone noise as a result. 

“Good for Adam, he should tell him to back the fuck off,” Davey snapped, flipping his hair off of one shoulder deliberately. “Some people.” His voice was huffy, and Jade did a poor job of concealing his own laughter at the consumingly possessive tone Davey had adopted. 

“Yeah, not to mention the guy’s a junkie...I feel like he might be trying out any and all contacts for some cash, not for the company. I mean, I wasn’t the best boyfriend in the world. I’m pretty sure that’s not what he’s looking for,” Jade explained, shrugging. Davey shifted around uncomfortably like a bird rustling its feathers to keep warm, or a pissed off cat all puffed up to make itself look bigger. Jade was again reminded of a terrier wagging for its master, because Davey was acting like a fuckin’ guard dog, like Jade was his _property_. Normally this would freak Jade out, but oddly enough he liked the feeling of someone’s presumed awareness of their ownership over him. 

“A junkie?! How can you be a good boyfriend to a junkie...I’m sure you were fine,” Davey said, waving a hand dismissively. 

“No, honestly I could give a shit about my previous significant others. I mean, I wanted to care about them! Don’t get me wrong...I just...” Jade’s voice faded, and he suddenly felt awkward, like he was over-sharing, or he sounded like a heartless asshole, which was not the reality of the situation. Davey, however, didn’t seem to think he was a dick. 

“Of course you wanted to. Some people just aren’t worth it,” Davey said, extending his legs out in front of him and leaning back onto Jade’s flat, pathetic pillows with the bleach-stained cases. He almost went through them, but pulled himself back, solidifying momentarily. “You better get to writing, because otherwise I’m gonna evaporate,” Davey declared, holding his near translucent arm up to the light so it could filter through him. 

Jade sighed, burying his face into the heap of comforter in front of him. “I can’t. I’m too tired and weirded out...I’m gonna just crash.” The nights prior, Jade had stayed up for an hour or so after coming back from 7-11 in order to write, Davey splayed out on the air mattress behind him asking the occasional question about his characters. It was wonderful; Jade had someone objective to bounce ideas off of, someone who in their lifetime had dabbled in fiction here and there, according to Davey. Living people were terrifying critics, but Davey...he needed Jade’s creative energy to exist, so he had no interest in shooting him down or breaking his spirit, only inspiring him. 

However, Jade just couldn’t do it tonight. His ramen headache had only been compounded by the florescent lights at work, and the conversation with Adam really didn’t help him in any area. He wanted to sleep. He wanted it to be tomorrow. 

Davey wrinkled his brow, but still nodded in agreement. “Okay, just make sure you do it tomorrow, okay? I wanna know what happens next...” Davey voice cracked over the word _next_ as he stretched his back dramatically. _I wanna know what happens_ might have been true, but more importantly, it was _I wanna be solid._ Jade understood his, but he also couldn’t keep his eyes open. He vowed he’d write tomorrow, dragging his heavy feet to the bathroom to brush his teeth, feeling Davey drift quietly after him like a dog at his heels.


	6. Chapter 6

When Jade woke up, Davey was gone. 

Not figuratively gone, or partially gone, but really, truly _absent_ from Jade’s apartment. As Jade pushed through the clumsy, ignorant moments of barely-awakeness, the first thing he was aware of, even before his own name, was the aching feeling of _lack_. It wasn’t that he just couldn’t see Davey...it was more than that, a gut-knowledge of his aloneness. The ghost had somehow left. 

It was fucking scarier than the haunting itself, and Jade sat bolt upright on his mattress, spine becoming icy and rigid like a trickle of cold water was running down it. It was then, when his eyes fell on his cell phone, that he realized he’d woken inexplicably a whole hour and a half earlier than he had to in order to get to work. He kicked his sheets off, tearing through his tiny apartment like a storm. “Davey?!” he called frantically, stumbling to the bathroom. “Davey, seriously, I...” 

But Jade didn’t know what. His breath was coming in short, uneven gasps, and he was struck with the chilling fact: _I have no one to call about this. There’s no one to help. I’m freaking out, and there’s no one to scrape me off the sidewalk_. It wasn’t like he could call Adam up and say, “I’m not crazy or anything, but my ghost disappeared and I’m kind of having a panic attack about it.” Jade swallowed, bracing his hands against the doorway and watching his bony knuckled slowly fade to white. He had to get his shit together. 

Taking a deep breath he slowly walked back to his bed, climbing in mechanically and laying on his back, focusing blearily on the ceiling and its stains and pockmarks above him. Steadied by the reliable in and out of his breath, Jade tried to think logically about this. So, Davey was gone. Magically evaporated from the apartment they shared. Probably because Jade’s energy was faulty, an unstable and unholy thing to sustain oneself off of. He contemplated this, pressing his palm open over his chest, distantly aware of his heart thumping on the other side of his ribcage, too quick and proving all his insecurities

Maybe Davey couldn’t haunt a crazy person. Jade’s essence or whatever the fuck he was living off of was completely flawed, after all. It was like someone trying to warm themselves with a blanket full of holes: sometimes it worked, but then your arm punched through the tattered surface and you were fucking cold again. 

Davey probably fell through one of his holes, Jade decided. He was unfit material for haunting, because he, like a ghost himself, was not whole. It was a depressing thought, really, and Jade felt his self-worth sinking like a real, physical thing, a stone in a stream of water. He closed his eyes, giving into the familiar sensation of abandoned struggle. It was an easy thing for Jade to do, cease fighting his own will. As soon as he realized something was his fault, his gaping, yawning hole, he laid down like a dog ready to die and admitted in full, “Yes, I’m a horrible person. Kick me all you want. I won’t stop you, in fact I’ll probably join in.” 

This was Jade’s issue, the thing he was prone to. Sinking. 

He’d been lying there on his back, lamenting how terrible of a spirit’s energy source he was, when his stomach started growling. He groaned, trying to put off having to heave his sadass, heavy, pathetic, and painfully _alone_ body off the mattress to go forage for food. After all, moving seemed impossible right now. But the seconds ticked away, and his hunger was completely uninterested in his immobility and self-loathing, so after the third awful, lonesome growl from his gut, he got up and miserably dragged himself to the kitchen.

As he put a pot of coffee on and poked some generic brand pop-tarts into his grimy microwave, he ached for Davey. He ached for the buzzing, electric chill he brought to his apartment, he ached for the easy, intriguing company and authentic smile. Jade was stirring some sweet and low into his favorite mug when it hit him: why _the hell_ did he let this happen?! 

His own energy, his flawed essence or moth-hole blanket or whatever the fuck it was that was too unreliable to haunt... _that was in his control_. It wasn’t a stone on a slow descent to the bottom of a silty river, slipping out of his hands...it was his own goddamn self! And if he wanted company, he couldn’t just lie there and _cry about it_...he had to do something about it. He had to patch the holes in his essence, so to speak. 

How on earth one went about this, Jade did not know. He couldn’t afford therapy, and thank god the insurance company paid off his medication but still, that didn’t seem to be doing the trick. He was functioning, but he wasn’t stable. He wasn’t whole enough to exist as half of a relationship, to sustain more than himself. 

Newly disgusted with himself, but in an uncharacteristically productive way, Jade chugged his coffee, brow furrowed in concentration as he thought of all the things he could possibly to to improve his soul-matter or whatever. He talked to himself through mouthfuls of poptart, pacing. “I could join a community service organization....because I have so much fucking _time_ with work and all...” Jade scoffed, thinking that he really should throw on some clothes and get ready to walk to the bookstore. “Or, I could learn to do paint by number or something.”

Then it occurred to Jade that honestly, the easiest thing he could do, at least in the meantime, was write. It wasn’t exactly community service, but it was better than paint by number, and it _did_ make Davey stronger, did improve his solidity. Without finishing his coffee or poptart, Jade flew to his laptop, throwing her open and sitting in a clumsy cross-legged crumple in front of her, grinding his teeth as the screen hummed to life and he brought up the word document he’d minimized the night before. 

And there, typed in the same nondescript default times new roman as the pages before it, was the single, center-aligned message: 

help me. 

Jade sighed in combined relief and terror, chewing his lip and flicking his eyes to the digital clock in he right hand corner of his desktop. He had a half hour. 

“Okay, okay,” he mumbled, pushing hand through his hair and starting to type manically. “You got it.” Jade started typing, and doors started shutting on their own accord. He could have cried with relief, a warm rush of pure emotion surging up in his throat, constricting his airway.

Davey was disgruntled by the time Jade typed him into quavering, weak existence. Nothing more than a flickering half-image, Jade could still make out the infuriated lines through his forehead, the crossed arms. Still, he hadn’t felt such an immense wave of relief in a long time. “God, I am so glad to see you,” Jade reached out to touch Davey, but his hand ceased the motion halfway there, muscles remembering a fleeting, intense burn of pain. Then he bit his lip, feeling stupid for trying, not only because of the physical impossibility but because it was very un-him. Jade only touched people in moments of complete vulnerability or connectivity, and it was always an impulse, something raw and unplanned and based in need instead of conscious want. 

He caught the thing that was kind of Davey rolling its eyes, and snapped back into his computer, fingers rapidly tapping the keyboard. Nonsense was coming out, but it didn’t seem to matter, Davey was back. Sort of. His eyes flitted to the clock, knowing he only had a few minutes left. 

“I gotta go soon, but I’m trying my best,” he explained, conceiving as he was writing, this dreamlike mess of free association. Something about dragon’s scales being like park benches, green and sun-warmed and glinting. Then he imagined a dragon stomping through a park’s playground, snatching up a little kid in its jaws and swallowing it whole with a fiery, sulfur scented belch. He wrote it all down, and felt Davey strengthening like a radio signal behind him. 

“Almost there,” he mumbled. 

Davey opened his mouth, but no words came out of it, instead a garbled, static-buzz. They both winced. 

“Maybe not quite,” Jade sighed, hastily clicking save and snapping Buffy shut, hauling himself up and grabbing his wallet, his bomber jacket, his house key. He pointed to the sensibly irritated haze of ectoplasm at the foot of his mattress, stating, “Try and keep yourself together. I have to go work, but I’ll get home as fast as possible, and I’ll write, and I’m so sorry I’m all full of holes and whatever.” Jade had a skip to his step as he slammed out the door. 

The weird, purplish haze that looked like Davey but also did not look like Davey flipped Jade off as he left. 

~*~

“Took you long-e-fucking-nough to figure that out,” was the first thing Davey snapped when he became a full person again. His eyes were narrowed but his heart wasn’t in it; he was most likely just as relieved to exist again as Jade was to have made him exist again. Upon arriving home from work, Jade had not left Buffy until Davey was capable of talking. 

“I’m sorry...I kind of spiraled...” Jade admitted sheepishly, admiring the four thousand words or so he’d just written. He skimmed it, kind of surprised to see that it wasn’t all complete shit, and there were a few good lines, and few beautiful images. 

“No shit. That’s the last time though...you have to _make_ time to write every day. That was painful as fuck, coming back...like a limb waking up. Numbness, the itch, pins and needles...all of it.” 

“I didn’t know what to do right away.” 

“I _told you_ writing helps. I feed off your creative energy...when you’re not creating, I fade. Plus, when you get depressed and _lie on your back mournfully stare at the ceiling_... I really fade. Fucking book it out of there, dude, because there’s nothing for me to turn into solidity,” Davey explained, gesticulating. It made Jade kind of dizzy to watch him talk...he was solid, as real looking as he’d ever been, but his hands kept on making trails of light in their wake when they moved, like shooting stars. It reminded Jade of the way the world looked after he swam in a chlorine pool too long with his eyes open: blurred at the edges, colors muted, streaked, and bleeding together. He blinked, trying to ignore it and process what Davey was saying. 

“That’s what I’m worried about though...that you can’t haunt me because I’m depressed. It’s like, when I’m functioning and whatever, you’re fine, but as soon as I sink down or have an episode my energy evaporates and you have nothing to hold onto.” Jade shivered, clutching his steaming mug of coffee a little tighter, trying to warm his freezing hands. Davey shook his head at him, stretching his legs out. 

“Nah, it’s not like that. I had nothing to hold onto because you were sleeping and hadn’t written the night before...I mean _I_ don’t sleep, I’m fucking dead. So I just got weaker and weaker, and then you woke up and freaked out and instead of just writing or trying to engage me or anything, you laid down and cried.” 

“I didn’t cry,” Jade huffed. 

“Whatever, you know what I mean,” Davey sighed in response. “What I’m saying is that it’s not like you’re fundamentally flawed...thinking its something fundamental is handicapping you from writing, and hence, me from existing. Instead of thinking of your energy as being too fucked up to sustain me, try thinking about using the energy you _do_ have creatively,” Davey said effortlessly, the whole speech flowing out of him river-like. Jade watched him with a slack mouth, kind of awed at his eloquence. 

“Sorry, but when you were alive were you a writer?” 

Davey blushed the best a ghost can blush, placing a hand instinctually on his sternum. “Pardon?” 

“Were you a writer? Because you, uh, use words really well. I like hearing to you talk. I’m listening to what you’re saying, I promise, I just...appreciate the way you say it, I guess,” Jade shrugged, feeling kind of naked as he explained this. Complimenting people was a skill he didn’t really possess, because flattery was often associated with flirting, and flirting was one of the totally uncharted areas of Jade’s life skills map. 

Davey smiled kindly, warm looking in spite of all the literal cold. “I wasn’t a good writer, I don’t think. Just a good talker.” 

Jade cocked his head, sipping his coffee thoughtfully. “You’d think those things were mutually exclusive, but they aren’t. I’m an okay writer on a good day, but talking to anyone but you, and sometimes Adam...jesus. It’s tough.” 

“It was one of the only things that came naturally to me when I was alive,” Davey said. 

“Something about it... it happens too fast and too unplanned, so anything I say is never _exactly_ what I want to say. As a writer, you can work on something until it’s as close to perfect as its gonna be. But with talking, its always going to be imperfect. I hate that about talking.” He realized, as he said this, that the reason why talking to Davey was so much easier than any other conversation he could ever have was that the urgency he mentioned, the “fast and unplanned” was absent with him. Davey was dead, and he had all the time in the world. Jade could explain what he meant, _exactly_ what he meant, because Davey would stick around to hear all the rough drafts and revisions. Because he _needed him_ , flawed essence or not, to live. 

“Everything’s imperfect. If you go through life expecting perfection out of everything you write or say, you’ll be constantly disappointed,” Davey said, a tiny edge of bitterness to his voice.

“I am constantly disappointed,” Jade admitted, chewing at the chapped skin of his lip.

“Maybe you should talk more, then.”

“It’s hard.” 

“I don’t think you’re too bad at it. Talking, I mean. Some people don’t do it at all they’re so afraid of messing up...at least you try,” He smiled again, shaking his head so his hair shimmered. “You’re bad at thinking, though.” He cut his eyes to Jade, raising one eyebrow. “Otherwise you would have remembered to write me back to life instead of lolling around on bed _crying_ like an idiot.” 

Jade bit back the second _I wasn’t crying_ and instead said with a raised eyebrow, “Well, next time I’ll remember.” 

“Seriously though, dude, you need to stop thinking your mental illness is this inherent flaw you can’t correct. Crazy people do that all the time, use their disease as a crutch, or an excuse to stop trying. Like, I know you’re fucked up, but that doesn’t mean you’re not enough for me to live off of.” 

“And what do you know about mental illness, or crazy people, or being fucked up? You’re dead. You don’t even sleep,” Jade reminded him. He was half kidding, but Davey looked back at him with such a tugging, plaintive look of untold stories that Jade’s mouth went dry, and his eyes dropped to his lap. 

“More than you know. I’m dead now, but I used to be alive, and fucked up, and crazy, too,” he didn’t sound bitter or affronted, just sad. Nostalgic, perhaps. Like even the fucked up and crazy of his life was better than the aching helplessness of his death. Jade nodded, knowing he was right. They didn’t say anything for awhile, gazes fixed on unmoving points in the apartment and the sound of trolley bells and car horns lonely and far away on the other side of the window. Then Jade unexpectedly asked, voice hoarse: “How did you die?” 

Davey’s eyes snapped up to his, an invisible strand of electricity tying them together. His mouth was parted in surprise, but he pulled it together, swallowing as he told Jade evenly, “A car accident.” 

Jade nodded, thinking again about the obituary, the black Honda’s crumpled metal sides crushing Davey inside, pulverized into a heap of twisted, steaming metal against a train’s iron grill. “That’s cryptic.” 

“It’s the answer to the question,” Davey shrugged. 

“What kind of car accident?” Jade pressed on. 

“I was driving, and some motherfucker hit me in his eighteen wheeler, pushed me onto the train tracks. My car was all jacked up and it was just wrong place, wrong time... and the train came,” Davey sighed, laughing a little in his very detached, humorless way. “You know, if anyone ever asks, it hurts to die. I didn’t die on impact... I bled to death. And it sucked. A million painful moments to regret all the cool shit I didn’t do when I was alive,” he explained. His eyes were huge and dark, so big Jade believed for a fleeting second that they couldn’t possibly belong to something that wasn’t human. 

“So you regretted it?” he breathed, a plume of steam making his words a real, visible thing in the cold air. 

Davey stared at him, flattening his mouth into a line, which disappeared. “Regretted dying? Well, of course. But it wasn’t my _choice_...doesn’t regret imply some choice?” He asked. 

Jade wanted badly to say, _are you sure it wasn’t a choice? Are you sure there was a motherfucker in an eighteen wheeler, or was it your own mental illness, your own crazy, your own fucked up that drove you there?_ But because Jade didn’t know how ghosts worked, and he wasn’t sure if Davey believed his own lies, or if they were lies at all, he just swallowed his questions and said, “regret does imply choice.” 

Davey nodded, a note of finality to his voice when he said, “When you die, I hope its quick. I wouldn’t want you to suffer through those moments of regret.”

“That would be a shame,” Jade responded, feeling off kilter. He rubbed the back of his head, feeling gooseflesh. 

“Or, better yet, you could do everything you wanted to do while you’re alive, and when you die, even if it’s slow and painful and awful, you’ll think, _I did all the cool shit I wanted to do.So bring it._ ,” Davey offered, grinning. 

“Funny, dead person is telling me how to live.” 

“You better believe it. Also, you can check paranormal investigation off of your bucket list...seeing as you have me and everything.” 

Jade’s insides fluttered, his left hand involuntarily tightening around his mug. “I did always want to buy all that fancy equipment and go into houses and scream a lot,” he said quietly, tugging at his hair with an absentminded compulsion.

“The real thing is much better,” Davey sighed, curling up like a cat on Jade’s mattress. His hair fanned out on it, glinting and unstable like black water. “Now get to writing, so I can actually be there to greet you in the morning.” 

Jade sighed, turning to his laptop and opening her, desktop blinking to life. His eyes caught on words and phrases that repeated in the mess he’d exploded frantically this morning, things like _you makes me feel_ and _laugh lines like cornsilk_ and _I’ve never wanted to touch someone so badly in all the time I’ve been breathing._ His cheeks burned, and he thought about writing, and talking, and the differences between them. 

“Well? I don’t hear fingers on keys, Jade,” Davey yawned while he stretched. 

“You pushy bastard.” Jade pretended to be exasperated, hiding the creeping threat of a smile which pushed at his mouth. He placed his hands on the keyboard, typing a tentative _I need you so much more than I’m willing to say. Maybe more than you need me. This morning, I felt like I’d been eviscerated. And that’s why I couldn't move._ There was nothing beautiful about it, nothing written or constructed. Just naked, Jade naked on the computer. He paused, glancing to Davey, suddenly paranoid. 

“Dave?” 

“Mmmm?” 

“How...how did you write “help me” on the computer this morning? When you were gone?” 

Davey rolled onto his back, furrowing his brow. “I don’t remember doing that. I mean, I thought that over and over again...help me...but I was too far gone at that point to do anything. But electronics pick up my signals...maybe the computer just absorbed by thoughts by osmosis or some shit. I have no idea, Jade, you’re the paranormal investigator.” 

Jade stared at his computer, scrolling up to the eerie “help me” still written there. “Weird shit.”

“Beats me.” 

“But...you can’t read what I’m writing?” Jade asked again, scanning over the pages of dragons and eaten children and park benches all punctuated by hopeless, mournful descriptions of dark hair and authentic smiles. He sighed when Davey said no.

“Nah, I’m not magic or anything. Why...” he said slyly, grinning at Jade. “You writing love poetry to me over there?” 

Jade rolled his eyes, cheeks heating up and belying his exasperated, “You wish.” Then he _I think so._ Then: _yes. yes I am._


	7. Chapter 7

A month went by, and with each passing day Jade became increasing suspicious of his own insanity. Honestly, what sort of guy attributed an increase in the stability of his mental health to a ghost? And more importantly what sort of guy _fell in love with_ a ghost? Jade, apparently. 

Jade had never been happier, more motivated, nor more conscious of his own improved state of being. So naturally, he had to be insane. Because he didn’t think he was insane, and crazy people never thought they were crazy. That was the whole point. 

One evening, while Davey and Jade shared the air mattress and watched _Dangerous Liaisons_ online, Jade thought it might be worthwhile to broach the subject to Davey.

“Are you paying attention to this?” He asked, gesturing to the screen, where a young Uma Thurman (easily the most attractive person in the movie) was trouncing about in a ridiculous dress. Davey laughed, shaking his head no. 

“Everyone in this is hideous. I know why they remade it now...at least the cast of _Cruel Intentions_ was hot. So in short, no. I’m not paying attention because I hate looking at all the characters.” He rolled over onto his stomach, shimmering forehead an inch or so away from Jade’s heavily sweatshirt bundled shoulder. “Why, do you want to change it?” 

Peering down at the relaxed proximity of his own body to Davey’s semblance of one, Jade chewed the inside of his lower lip thoughtfully. “Nah, I wanted to ask you your opinion of my sanity.” 

“Your sanity? What about it?” Davey narrowed his eyes, rolling over onto his side so he was facing Jade. The mattress barely bowed under his weight, creating the illusion he was feather light. Which he may have been. Jade wouldn’t know, seeing as he’d never held Davey before. 

“Do I possess any sanity to speak of?” Jade said lamely, sitting up so he could pause Uma Thurman mid Victorian-simper. “I mean, am I seriously crazy? You know, if Adam were to come visit me, which he insists upon doing, I don’t think he’d be particularly supportive of our living situation...I think he’d tell me I was crazy and needed to be thrown back into the hospital or something.” 

“If he came to visit, he’d see me too. It’s not like I’m only visible to you,” Davey tossed his hair, which reflected the light oddly. He sounded confident, but Jade could sense his agitation, his nerves. 

“Are you _sure,_ though?” 

“What are you getting at?” Davey finally said with a slant, hesitance making his voice creep out on tiptoes. He raised one eyebrow, and Jade realized he sounded like he was about to the pull the plug, launch into some kind of weird ghost break up, _It’s not you its me, but you have to find some other lonely sap to haunt_ , speech. Which of course, was not at all the case. 

“Oh Dave, I’m not kicking you out,” he explained, insides flip-flopping a little as the strain passed from Davey’s face, which flushed a peculiar ghost-flush in relief. “I’m just being a megalomaniac again. Questioning whether you’re something I created because I didn’t want to be lonely anymore, or if you’re just honest to god a ghost that’s haunting my apartment.”

Davey laughed then, the planes of his face these sharp white angles split through with laugh-lines, the most sincere of grins. “You’re massively arrogant,” Davey said, but there was nothing harsh about it, a rather gentle amusement softening the words into something affectionate. Jade shook his head, eyes trained on the skittering shape of Davey’s pale hand as it smoothed the bedsheets.

“I know,” he admitted, scoffing. “But it’s not like I can poke you or anything to see if you’re real. It’s kind of tough to live with someone who can’t really verify their actuality...” he added clumsily, shrugging. Davey stared at him with twinkling, narrowed eyes, prodding thoughtfully the corner of his mouth with his tongue. 

“Poke me. Go ahead,” he declared after a moment, and then he held out his arm, placing it in front of Jade’s shivering chest. “If you’re so sure you created me, oh magnificent creator.” 

Jade stared at that arm, its intricate tattoos and tremendously real looking skin, the almost translucently light brown hair standing out in soft contrast. He was nauseous, and not at the prospect of pain. There was a heavy moment of loaded silence where Jade flattened out his mouth and let his stomach swim, thinking of every risk he’d ever talked himself out of taking. 

Then, the moment passed. Jade gritted his teeth and pressed the pad of his index finger to Davey’s arm. Immediately, the chill of the weird, semi-solidity there burned with a fierce intensity, and Jade swore, giving into the instinct to jerk away, static exploding across his vision.

“Yeah, that hurts doesn’t it. Does that _feel_ real?” Davey grinned, teeth shining and flickering coyote white in the dark, eyes sharp with a clever hunger. And yeah, it _fucking hurt_ , almost too bad for Jade to comprehend, the feeling of dry ice eroding away flesh, of a still-hot lighter pressed upside down to tender skin. But still, it was something. It was proof. And before Jade could comprehend why he would do such a multi-leveled, self-destructive thing, he bit past the pain and reached out, closing his fist over Davey’s forearm. 

It hurt so bad he lost his breath, but even more stomach-wrenching than the pain was Davey’s expression of shock, which was swiftly usurped by an expression of blown apart, fragmented lust, which multiplied like a kaleidoscope. His eyes darkened, mouth parting into an abstract wet thing as Jade blinked through tears, rubbing his hand over the bone of Davey’s elbow, the curve of his shoulder and back again before he couldn’t take it anymore and let go, gritting his teeth so hard he saw stars and imagining the entirety of his palm one weeping, broken blister. 

“Christ,” he hissed, clutching his hand to his chest and fighting the queasy lurch of his stomach, eyes shut tight. 

“Jade,” Davey said quietly to his side, and Jade could sense the chill of his hand hovering somewhere above him, wanting desperately to touch, knowing it couldn’t. He opened his eyes, squinting past hazy, light-filtering wet. 

“Ow,” he mumbled, smiling and holding up his hand, which they both examined. It looked inflamed and red, but otherwise undamaged, so Jade sighed in relief, dropping the trembling dead weight of his palm to his chest with a sick sound. “Okay, you’re real.” 

“And you’re kinky,” Davey quipped, although there was an awed, hoarse quaver to his voice. “Why on earth would you...I mean...” Davey shook his head, turning a couple of shades darker, hair falling in his face like river water. 

“Because I wanted to,” was what Jade answered, and they laid there side by side for a very long time, Davey’s solidity occasionally giving way to a subtle glimmer, and Jade panting like he’d been fucked. 

~*~  
“Adam, how many times have I tried to convince you I wasn’t crazy?” Jade asked to the phone pressed to his ear, twirling the grey nylon drawstring of his sweatshirt around an index finger. 

“Eh...more than a few. You tried at least every other day for awhile when you were really going off the deep end,” Adam answered conversationally. 

Jade cringed. “Not the greatest track record. Well...out of all those times, was I ever successful?” 

“Jaderade...I don’t like where this is going.” Adam announced. He was clearly in the car; Jade could tell by the animal-growl of Donna’s sad excuse for a radio in the background. He could easily imagine Adam slouched behind the wheel, burning valuable gas and the skin of his left arm as it hung out the drivers side window baking in the sun, stuck in LA’s notorious bumper to bumper traffic. “Spit it out, dude. What crazy thing did you do you that you’re gonna try and pass off as normal? You better hurry so I can figure out the damage control and drive up there, haul your skinny ass in the car, and deposit you at the front door of your shrink’s office.” 

“I didn’t _do/i > anything,” Jade said in a hushed voice, only because he didn’t want Davey, who was checking his baseball message boards at the opposite end of the counter on Buffy, to overhear him and make some snarky comment about _doing_ things. He wasn’t sure he could carry out conversation like a functioning human being if something like that happened. _

_“The suspense is killing me,” Adam urged before swearing under his breath. “Man, this traffic...people can’t fucking _drive_ on the 101.” _

_“Okay. Adam,” Jade said, inhaling sharply. “I feel saner than I’ve felt in months. Years, really. I’m taking my meds, sure, but aside from that I’ve been writing like crazy. More than ever, even with the multiple jobs,” Jade breathed, chewing his tongue nervously before adding in a rush. “But I think my apartment is haunted.”_

_A few heartbeats of awkward silence passed, during which Jade squirmed where he was sitting at the counter, dreading Adam’s inevitable _Are you sure you’re taking your meds?!_ concerned mother schtick he always threw at Jade when he was worried. But shockingly, what Adam actually said was: “...Duh. I could have told you that.” _

_Jade released the nervous breath he was holding. “I’m serious, Ad.”_

_“No, I am too! The apartment had that weird, misaligned feel, the shutting windows...you know. All that stuff you told me about. Plus, the previous owners sold it for dirt cheap, seemed eager to get it off their hands...I dunno. Seems like some kind of weird hoodoo to me.”_

_“So you don’t think I’m crazy.”_

_“Nah, I think you’re crazy...” Adam started, audibly slamming the breaks and coughing some nasty curse at the apparently terrible driver in front of him. “But not because you think you might have a ghost.”_

_“It’s not a might. It’s a yes,” Jade assured him, wanting to add, _his name is Davey Marchand, he lives with me, and I’m quite mortifyingly infatuated with him_. He glanced at Davey, eyes scanning up his legs, the easy way his jeans hung off his hips. Certainly not a _might_. _

_“Whatever. I’m just saying, I never believed in that superstitious shit but I never _not_ believed in it. I’ve seen some strange stuff in my lifetime, so who am I to say ghosts aren’t real, right?” Adam explained. And of course, because Jade knew better than anyone at this point, with his gaze fixed absentmindedly on the dead man in his kitchen perusing baseball websites, he agreed. _

_“Right on. Thanks for not blaming this on my crazy.”_

_“Right on, Jaderade. Now, aside from your little supernatural friend, how’s life going? How’s that _we’ll see where it goes_ boyfriend?” The nearly perpetual leer was back in Adam’s voice, signaling the end of his short-lived spiritual acceptance of the paranormal or whatever that shit had been. Jade rolled his eyes, wincing at the boyfriend mention. _

_“Ugh, nonexistent. That fell through,” he lied, eyes still on Davey as he muttered something about _stupid trades_ to the computer, sticking his tongue out unconsciously . Jade smiled a stupid smile, elated feeling swelling in his throat like a weed and making him breathless. _

_“Oh no! Did he turn out to be another junkie?” Adam asked, sounding genuinely disappointed, fingers tapping audibly on the wheel as he sighed._

_“Just... not what I was looking for. I’m not disappointed, though.”_

_“Eh, you win some you lose some. At least you’re still in gayass San Francisco, with all those single gay dudes wanting your dick. Don’t let this one get you down.”_

_“I’m not down,” Jade sighed, rubbing his hands through his hair, newly clean and still damp from the shower. “I’m making kind-of friends though...my co-workers at the bookstore are at least half cool.” This was a partial truth. Jade did enjoy his bookstore job more than his other two, (SevenEleven was still awful, and all the girls at the vintage clothing store spent the whole shift of sorting clothes telling each other stories about their half-remembered, drunken weekends spent puking on the guys they tried to hook up with, and Jade was less than interested,) but he wouldn’t call his co-workers even _kind of_ friends at this point. It was hard to make lasting impressions when he rushed home every day to write and hang out with his _actual_ if not _actually_ alive friend. _

_“Good, good. I’m proud of you. Just don’t replace me...if you find another good looking guy with a predilection for pussy, then I might have to come kill him,” Adam assured Jade, demonstrating his uncanny ability to unintentionally weave alliteration into every day speech and _still_ manage to make it sound crass. Jade laughed, shaking his head. _

_“Don’t worry Ad, I can assure you that no one here gets as much pussy as you do,” he drawled, rolling his eyes._

_“Damn straight. Talk to you later, man. I’m working on getting a three day weekend off so I can come visit you. Meet your ghost.”_

_Jade’s eyes flashed, cutting to Davey and his miserable, _my team sucks but I can’t help but love them_ face, his handsome jawline as it worked to chew absently at a strand of ectoplasmic black hair. Then Jade sighed, answering honestly. “I’m sure he’d love that.” _

_~*~_

_It was later that night that Jade suspicions were confirmed. Davey hadn’t died on accident._

_To celebrate his first round of paychecks, Jade ordered in from the Vietnamese place on the corner. It was over a steaming bow of Pho soup that Jade asked Davey, after carefully stirring some chili and sprouts into the spicy broth, “So I feel like I don’t actually know what you were like before you died.”_

_Davey shrugged, tearing his eyes longingly away from the plate of spring rolls next to Jade’s soup bowl. “Well, I wasn’t that different. I mean, I ate and slept. But aside from that...same charming devil,” he smiled weakly then, a sort of unconvincing twitch at the corner of his mouth._

_“I mean, what did you do? Your job, your hobbies, your friends...you know. That stuff,” Jade said with a furrowed brow, feeling distantly like he was on the brink of some breakthrough with Davey. There was a loaded feeling to the way Davey was looking at him, like he’d been caught in the act._

_“Ah, so me on paper,” Davey said carefully, pressing the tips of his fingers together. “I was...ugh, I went to San Francisco state. I was a sports medicine major, English minor.”_

_“Versatile,” Jade shrugged, raising his brow at the whole sports medicine thing. He was always underestimating Davey’s baseball obsession, it seemed._

_“I guess. Hobbies...well, I jogged a lot. Rode my bike. Did martial arts.”_

_“...Martial arts? Serious?” Jade’s eyebrow arched even higher, an inelegant curve creeping dangerously close to his hairline. “That’s so...butch.”_

_“Hey! I was a personal trainer when I died, you know. That’s what I _did._ ” He snapped defensively. _

_Jade imagined Davey in a stretchy muscle shirt clinging to his pecs, biceps bulging as he bent over some fat girl struggling sweatily through a set of sit ups. It was kind of funny, but also not that hard to believe. Davey never wore anything but his loose fitting levis and grey-white V-neck, but Jade could imagine he had a nice body under all of that. “I’m not judging you, it’s cool. It’s just so far out of my comfort zone I can’t even...” Jade trailed off, shaking his head. “I haven’t been to the gym since I was in college.”_

_Davey’s jaw dropped in genuine affront. “I would die without a gym.”_

_“Apparently you died _with_ one. So it didn’t matter,” Jade shrugged, vaguely aware there was an unnecessary implication in what he was saying, something insidious and prodding, something like railroad tracks. _

_“Point taken,” Davey sighed, eyes dull and glassy._

_“And friends? What were your friends like? Family?” Jade inquired. Davey brightened up, closing his jaw with an alert snap._

_“I had no friends,” he announced cheerily._

_Jade snorted, “You’re full of shit. You’re like, the most socially adept person I’ve ever met.”_

_“Well, you’ve not met that many people, Jade. You are mental and all. Also, this is the post-death me...new and improved. To impress you, so you don’t call an exorcist,” Davey joked, eyes cutting to his lap. “But seriously, I had friends in college, but once I started working I just kind of lost touch. Working out, doing MMA, it was an easy way to just flatline in something physical so I didn’t have to think about how everyone I knew was getting married, having kids, whatever. While I was still alone,” Davey shrugged, ghost-cheeks coloring in a shimmery, grey way._

_“Why didn’t you keep in touch with them?” Jade asked quietly._

_Davey gazed into the oblique, brow furrowing slightly. “I don’t know. Too much work.”_

_It seemed like a vague, noncommittal kind of answer from someone as usually blunt as Davey, but Jade sensed the mass of hulking ice beneath the tip that was showing above frigid waters, the undercurrent motivating Davey’s newfound quiet. Davey didn’t want to talk about this, and Jade knew why. Because Davey Havok, between his gym visits and evaporating friends, hadn’t wanted to see anyone. He probably hadn’t wanted to leave bed, to eat, to speak, to breathe._

_“Why did you kill yourself?” Jade carefully spoke, recoiling as he said it like Davey’s chill might reach out and burn him again. Instead Davey just laughed a frantic, humorless laugh, hands flying up to his face and eyes suddenly hidden behind white palms, mouth a twisted gash beneath._

_“God Jade, why does anyone kill themselves? Because they’re depressed motherfuckers, that’s why.” It comes out wheezy and hysterical, something to prove, something to derail a train. The air suddenly tight, Jade struggled to inhale, fighting the heat springing to his neck._

_“Yeah, but why did _you_ kill yourself? Because you were alone? Because--”_

_“Because anything had to be better than feeling nothing. Being nothing had to be better. And that’s why, I think. But I can’t be sure because it was a long time ago, and I was alive, and things are different when you’re alive...things like time. Anyway, I was right, so why does it matter?” Davey’s voice was harsh and it snagged along Jade, catching in places between his ribs, in his teeth._

_“You don’t regret it?” He asked after a tense moment of locked eyes._

_“I didn’t say _that_. I just said that this was better than feeling nothing. It’s different.” _

_And it was, so Jade stopped prying, poking at the remainder of his Pho noodles with a lost appetite and a rabbiting heart, wondering how Davey as a dead man could feel more than he did as a live one. And hoped, with a sick leap of amazement, if the difference could have anything to do with him._


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this a little while ago, and it bears the scars of my brief and tiresome obsession with consciousness. By comparison, the second half is really shallow. I have to move this plot along, though!

Jade was writing about consciousness, bent over Buffy in his lap and mind racing over the contours of Davey’s almost body, when it all happened. It seemed appropriate, in retrospect, that Davey would say what he said in the midst of Jade’s complex analysis of consciousness and it’s nuanced meaning, but at the time it came as a shock, unexpected and ice cold and concrete, when everything else surrounding him was abstract. 

“Hey, can I run this by you? I need to know if I’m making sense...and you know more about consciousness than I do, being bodiless and all,” Jade said, voice curt and frantic in that way it got when he was excited about what he was writing. 

“Partially bodiless! I wouldn’t say I was _completely_ without solidity...” Davey argued, gesturing to his partial-body, which was currently sprawled at Jade’s feet, like a dog at the end of the mattress. 

“Yeah, regardless. I just want your opinion.” 

“Shoot,” Davey said, sighing. Jade could feel his eyes burning into him, but he kept his own gaze trained on the computer screen, oddly wary about making eye contact with Davey, as if he could sense what was coming. 

“Okay, Well I started by defining the sensory side of consciousness...like, how do we know we’re here, how are we aware? Because we smell, and we hear, and we feel the ground under our feet and that our throat is sore and that we have tendonitis in out index finger, etc. You get the picture. But those are all sensory, and reliant on the existence of flesh. We know we’re here because we have a body, and skin that can hurt, and feel things. But you...you don’t.”

“I appreciate you summing up my complete lack of sensory intake,” Davey said dryly, but Jade ignored him. 

“But you’re conscious! Fully, completely conscious _without sensation_ ...so I’m just trying to collect _other_ things that define consciousness existence...like feeling, and memories, and a history, and relations, and speech...and the other shit you told me is holding you here. Because consciousness and existence _cannot_ just be dependent upon a having a body,” Jade said, taking a deep breath at the end and feeling a little wheezy, like he didn’t breathe enough. He still kept his eyes down, scanning the lines of neat print on screen, still aware of Davey’s warm, even, critical gaze. 

“Well...?” Jade asked, finally allowing his eyes to skitter up and meet Davey’s, if only for the briefest of seconds. “Does that ring true to you? Because it’s _about_ you.” 

Davey stayed quiet for a few more impossible seconds, then cleared his throat and said, “You know what sucks?” 

“What sucks, aside from, this stupid paragraph...” Jade mumbled, furiously editing and ignoring the inexplicable heat on his cheeks. 

Then, Davey said it. “It sucks that I’m totally, consciously in love with you, and I’m dead, and you’re not.” 

That succeeded in ripping Jade’s eyes up, and he stared. Stared at Davey and his serene, pale face, mouth tightlipped and teeth clenched somewhere in his mouth, subpar paragraph forgotten. “Wait, you’re...”

“Yes. Completely,” Davey interrupted, shutting his eyes which trembled under the lids in this painful, feral way. “Sorry if that freaks you out, but it’s not like I can do anything about it, being too cold to touch and all...” 

And without regard to the pain of existence, or the pain of impossibility, and heedless to the fact that Jade was conscious of his skin that could hurt, he pushed his computer from his lap, leaned across the mattress and kissed Davey, with his eyes closed and his heart stopping. 

It lasted for less than a second, but he stayed for as long as his flesh allowed it, submitting to the shudder of want and the ache of _never being able to get close enough_ , which stung deep in his chest. And then he pulled away, lips ripping as he moved from Davey’s frozen mouth. The fragile skin frayed and tore so that Jade bled. 

“God, you’re a stupid fuck,” Davey’s voice rasped in awe, hand raising on impulse to catch the bead of crimson forming in the corner of Jade’s mouth, then dropping. Somehow he looked both more solid than Jade had ever remembered him being, but also miraculously translucent, as if Jade could actually see the knot of blood and flesh and heartbeat speeding away in his chest, locked in behind his ribs. And for a moment, Jade believed he could bring him back to life, just by reaching out and fitting his fist gently around that heart. 

“I’m sorry,” Jade said stupidly, only half aware it wasn’t a fitting response. 

“Me too.” Davey replied quietly. 

They studied each other, bodies yearning towards the maddening inches between them. They were breathing hard, and Jade’s cheeks were hot even though the rest of him felt nearly frozen. He knew they were only heeding the constraints of reality because of the memory of pain. Because all anyone ever really wants in life is to fall in love, the memory of pain seemed like a superfluous reason to maintain that excruciating space. 

But Jade couldn’t think. He couldn’t wrap his mind around something as useless as the word _reality,_ because Davey was real. He was conscious, and blinking, and wanting before Jade. And he could feel pain, because there it was as sharp as the taste of Jade’s own blood in Jade’s own mouth, shining, black and longing in the irises of Davey’s eyes. The pain was there where Jade resided, as a tiny, nearly colorless reflection. 

And no one could tell him otherwise, that this wasn’t real. Because he felt it huge and raw and rearing, the most he’d ever felt about any one thing. The most crystal clear sensation, the most articulate _desire_ : I want to touch this person. 

It was real, and _true_. As true as all of the other True desires Jade had ever felt, things like _I want to die_ and _I don’t want to be alone anymore_. 

“It’s kind of funny,” Jade choked out, breaking the tense silence. “That before this, the thing I wanted most was to die, then it was to find someone, to stop being alone. But I never liked anyone enough, I never liked anyone at _all_. But now, now I’ve found you. And your dead. So maybe I should have died after all,” he laughed a little at the end, before the laugh turned into a cough. 

Davey shook his head, eyes swimming and throat bobbing with an exhausted swallow. “No, no you’re wrong. I was wrong...” And he was quiet for a minute, worrying the bedspread between his fingers and practicing the futile art of restraint. 

Jade waited, until Davey looked up and said, “I regret it, if you’re curious.” 

“Regret what?” Jade breathed, even though he knew. 

“Killing myself,” Davey said quickly, voice harsh. “It was dumb and I wish I hadn’t done it.”

“But you said you were happier dead than you had ever been alive,” Jade’s voice was weak. 

“Because of _you_ ,” Davey interjected. “I could have been happier than either of those if I’d just waited it out. If I waited, I might have actually met you when we were both alive. And if we were both alive, I could touch you without it hurting. and I pretty much want that, more than anything else,” his voice broke towards the end, all-pupil eyes sweeping up Jade’s body with all the hunger of a man who can’t sleep anymore, can’t eat anymore, can’t fuck anymore.

“That’s what I want, too,” was all Jade could say. As if it meant something, as if this were a situation where mutual feelings were enough, and there was a happily ever after implied in that three-letter promise of _too_. 

But instead all they could do was stare with wet eyes, stare while Jade licked blood from his lips and Davey flickered on and off like a light in a haunted room. 

 

~*~

It had to be Saturday, because Adam was on his doorstep. Jade had buzzed him in a few minutes earlier, then stumbled out of bed and to the door in a half-stupor to unlatch the chain, not quite registering what having a visitor meant. Being padded up in half his clothing to sustain bodyheat with Davey curled up in the covers by his side was second nature to him at this point, but as the door swung open and Adam’s previously smiling face went pale, Jade immediately shucked out outermost jacket. “It’s cold in here,” he defended himself before any formal greetings were exchanged. 

“Fuck yeah it is, why do you have the AC cranked up so high?!” Adam asked, craning his neck to look over Jade’s shoulder. Adam was tall but Jade was too if he stood on his tip-toes, which he did, trying to block out the rest of his apartment. 

“What are you doing here?” he asked, regretting his tone as the words left his mouth. 

“I can’t surprise my friend?” Adam said carefully, picking apart Jade with his eyes in this critical, scrutinizing way, clearly perplexed by the surplus of jackets. Jade felt like a carcass being shredded to bits by a vulture, though that was a preferred fate compared to the metaphorical counterpart, where he was actually alive to feel Adam’s gaze prodding around in him. He didn’t know why wearing seven sweatshirts at one time was such a big deal, though he supposed everything was kind of a big deal when you had a history of insanity.

“Somehow I feel this isn’t a social visit,” Jade said skeptically. “This is about the ghost thing. You think I’m going crazy again. 

Adam sighed, leaning against the doorframe and closing his tired eyes. “Jade, you’re paranoid. I’m just checking up on you. Sometimes I worry, because you’re here all alone and--”

“I’m not alone,” Jade blurted. 

Adam stared, concern lining his face. Jade stared back defiantly, his cheeks heating up and stance   
wide and holding his ground. He _knew_ he was speaking recklessly, he knew this was doing nothing for his case, but he couldn’t help it. Faced with a question to his newfound sanity, his newfound _happiness_ , nothing seemed more important than fighting for it. _Proving it_. 

With a sudden, thrill, Jade realized that this was what all of those other writers meant when they wrote about love like a force, something that makes you crazy. A different kind of crazy than what he was used to. He had never been so sure about something in his life.

“Right. I forgot. You have a ghost,” Adam threw his hands in the air. “Are you _sure_ you’re okay?” 

Jade crossed his arms, cocked his head. “You came here with this idea that I wasn’t, and now you’re hearing everything I say not as truth, but as evidence that supports what you already thought. That’s called cognitive confirmation, Ad, it’s a very common social physiological--”

“Jade! I just want to help, and you need help!” Adam yelled, pushing Jade fiercely with two open palms against the jutting bones of his shoulders. Jade stumbled backward, shocked into tripping. He lost a few feet of the apartment he was guarding, and of course, Adam was advancing, stepping across the threshold. “I’m sorry,’ he said, voice gentler but still wavering. 

Then Adam’s gaze moved _behind_ Jade, to the kitchen and through that, the bedroom. Jade felt him tense, watched his face change.“Is that someone in your bed?!” 

Jade froze for a second, but then as Adam stepped to push past him he recovered his mental faculties and threw his arms out, bracing himself in the doorway. “No.” 

“Jade! I _knew_ there was something wrong, I--” 

“ _No._ ” He urged voice stony and mind racing to cover the myriad of reasons why he _didn’t_ want Adam to meet Davey. Not yet, anyway. It was all too much, too much for Adam to take in, and too much for Jade to expect him to. But most of all, the darkest undercurrent thrumming beneath the sum of his fear was as such: if Adam was able to accept the inconvenient reality that Davey was a ghost, he wouldn’t, _couldn’t_ be expected to accept the even more inconvenient reality that Jade loved him, and wanted to be with him. And in order to be with him, Jade had to make a choice. He’d thought about this all night, laying and shivering and longing next to Davey’s unsleeping but quiet ectoplasm. They didn’t speak of it, but that was enough for Jade to decide on what had to be done.

Davey couldn’t live. It was impossible to change that. but Jade could, and would, die. 

Adam wouldn’t like that, so Jade blocked the door. 

“What are you hiding from me?!” Adam’s voice was harsh, his deft hands strong and attempting to pry Jade’s fingers from the frame. 

“We need to sit down and have a very serious talk before I let you in. Let’s get some coffee, I’ll take you to the Blue Danube, just--”Jade stops, and closes his eyes. He can feel the chill of Davey’s almost-body just inches behind him. Every fiber he’s constructed of wants to turn around, wants to turn and look and drink of the first thing he’s ever loved consummately, but he stops himself, eyes remaining locked on Adam’s, blue and sparkling. 

“Whose this?” Adam says. There’s an unsteadiness to his voice that tells Jade he knows something is off about Davey, but he doesn’t yet realize that he’s an apparition. Jade looks at the floor, something inside of him sinking like a sailboat in a storm. He is too tiny and battered and ill fit for the situation to let anything happen but what it happening, so he stands between them, helpless.

“I’m Adam,” Adam says carefully, lingering by the door. 

“I know. I’ve heard wonderful things about you. I’d shake your hand, but it would hurt. I’m Davey, by the way.”

The three of them stood silently for a moment, air taut and energized like a hot wire pulled tight and triangular, flickering between them. Davey’s image was solid for a few remarkable seconds until he shifted then crackled, and Adam gasped. There was no more room for illusion. 

“Okay, okay. I guess this is happening,” Jade said, letting a rush of air escape his lungs in defeat. 

“Ad, this is my ghost. Dave, this is Adam.” 

Adam’s mouth was hanging open as Davey jerked into an awkward half-bow, half-curtsey and said, “Pleased to meet you.”


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Adam was sitting on the floor. Seeing as Jade was too cheap for furniture, and the bed seemed like an invasive place to have a mild anxiety attack in, Jade steered the slowly collapsing Adam to a corner in his room where he could sit and be propped up by two walls. So there Adam remained, blinking at them. Or, blinking at Jade. He appeared to be avoiding letting his eyes fall on Davey, like looking at him would hurt as much as touching him. 

“I don’t have anything to drink but tap water. I’m sorry, I’m poor and unglamorous,” Jade said nervously, handing Adam a plastic big-gulp cup. Adam took it, but set it down beside him, shaking. 

“I’m waiting for you to say something,” Jade added, voice thinning out into something close to a wheeze. 

Davey held his hand out, like he was going to touch Jade’s shoulder. Seeing it out of the corner of his eye, Jade turned to look at him, unable to smile but letting his eyes linger in wordless meaning. 

“Something?” Adam said after a few seconds. Then he looked up, eyes squinty as they finally fell on Davey. “It can hear us talk?” He whispered. 

Davey bristled. “Uh, _yeah_ , it can. It’s also a he.” 

“Dave, shh,” Jade scolded, gingerly laying a hand on Adam’s arm. “Are you okay? Drink some water, please. This really isn’t as big a deal as you’re making it out to be...” 

Adam shook his head, laughed a curt laugh. “I think I’m responding to the sudden realization that you’re room mates with a dead guy the way any normal person would respond to realizing you’re room mates with a dead guy. Shock.” He finally took a tentative sip of water, grimacing as it went down. “I mean, it’s not every day one has a paranormal experience.” 

Davey sighed dramatically, flopping down on Jade’s mattress. He didn’t fall through it, perhaps feeding off the immense amount of tension and energy in the air and sustaining solidity off of it. “It’s not every day one has his existence summed up as ‘paranormal experience.’ It’s kind of humiliating.” 

Jade wished badly he could put his hand on Davey’s knee, or sink his fingers into his hair, something. Any small gesture to let him know that he felt for him, and he was sorry that this wasn’t going in the smoothest possible fashion. There were few times now that Jade _didn’t_ want to put his hands on Davey in some way, though, few times when he wasn’t consumed by longing for the possibility of some small gesture, _any gesture_ , anything. 

He settled for meeting Davey’s gaze, with all of himself behind his eyes. 

“Oh god,” Adam suddenly said, his exclamation following the unsavory sound of water being spit back into a half full cup. “This is the guy, isn’t it? This is the one whose...oh _god_ Jade, this is so _like you_.” Then Adam put his face in his hands, rubbing insistently at his temples with his thumbs. “You are the _hardest_ friend to have, dude.” 

“What did I do this time?!” Jade asked, crossing his arms. He noticed that there was gooseflesh forming on Adam’s skin, and he pulled one of his many sweatshirts out of the depths of his rumpled sheets, and handed it to him. “Put this on.” 

“It’s a fucking icebox in here,” Adam grumbled, pulling the sweatshirt over his head. It was too small for him, and the sleeves clung to his built arms in this way that would have made Jade laugh if the room wasn’t tight with things unsaid between them. “You live in a _fucking icebox_ , Jade,” Adam said again, shaking his head. 

“Will you please tell me whatever it is that I’ve done to piss you off? Because I think you’re being unfair. Because all I’ve _really_ done is get my shit together, stop being psychologically dependent on you, gotten _jobs_ , paid _rent_ , started _actually fucking living my life--”_

 _Living your life?_ ” Adam yelled, cutting Jade off and throwing his sweatshirt-squeezed arms into the air. “Jade, you are _so fucking hard to take care of_. I thought, I _thought_ you were living a “normal life” up here and that you were finally starting to date and meet people and stopped being such a misanthropic depressed lunatic, but instead I find out that you’re actually just...just... _sleeping with a ghost_!” 

“If only,” Davey mumbled. Then he got up, flickering his way to the kitchen. “Seems like you guys have some bullshit to work out,” he might have said, but Jade could hardly hear him over the angry thud of blood behind his ears. He watched Davey go, wondering how on earth he had finally found that one person who he wanted to live with and die with. How he had finally found the one he could _communicate with_ , effortlessly, naturally, without words or bodies. He turned back to Adam, who he realized spoke a different language, and lived in a different world. 

Adam was panting, ready to fight, blue eyes flashing and color on his cheeks. “I just want the best for you Jade. I want you to be happy. But you make it _impossible._ ” 

“I _am_ happy. For the first time in my _life_ , I’m happy, but because it doesn’t fit into your neat little definition of what’s normal, you’ve decided I’m worse off than ever. Have you even _noticed_ how much I’ve improved?” Jade stood up abruptly, pacing and unsatisfied with his words. He was only just realizing that communication with any other human, even Adam, always fell short. His words didn’t quite mean what he wanted them to, and if they did, he knew that Adam wouldn’t understand their meaning entirely. There was always something getting lost in translation, unless he was talking with Davey. 

Adam stood up too, raking his hands through his hair and staring at Jade with his jaw clenched and twitching. “Jade, I _have_ noticed that you’ve improved. But this can only go so far. This...this thing, this guy you’re with...he can’t give you what you need, what everyone needs. He’s not a real person. You can’t take him to dinner or go dancing--”

Jade scoffed. “You. You! Those are things you like to do, dancing and movies and dinner and all of that social protocol bullshit. I _never_ wanted to do those things. And who the fuck are you to say what I _need_? How do you know what I need?” He barked it out, his finger held pointed and accusatory at Adam’s chest. 

Blinking, Adam’s hard-edged gaze of fury melted into one of hurt, his eyes darkening to a stormy sky color. “Because I’m your best friend,” he said coldly, reaching out and pushing Jade’s hand down. “Get that out of my face.” 

For a moment, Jade wasn’t so sure of himself. The warmth of Adam’s skin, sure and real on his wrist, shook the certainty he had so firmly rooted himself in that Davey was what he needed, all he needed. His eyes flitted to the kitchen, where Davey was slumped at the counter, head buried in his arms and hair split black ink, reflecting light so convincingly for a moment, he looked flesh and blood. Then, he flickered. Jade’s whole body ached at the thought a future where he could never feel the liquid slide of that hair beneath his lips. He turned back to Adam, who did not even know that he and Davey couldn’t even touch, and already thought it was impossible. 

“I’m sorry,” Jade said quietly, hands flitting to clasp behind his neck. “I know you’re just looking out for me. I know this must be shock.” 

Adam’s voice dropped to a pained whisper, his eyes narrowing. “Are you sure you’re in love with him, Jade? I mean, _he’s a ghost_. He’s _not real_.” 

Jade’s heart clenched. He hadn’t even told Adam that he was in love with Davey, meaning that some wordless piece of it was present in the room, watching them, listening to them. He didn’t answer that part, because of course he was sure. “Just because someone is dead doesn’t mean they’re not real.”

Sighing, Adam’s eyes swept up to the ceiling, where they lingered. “Jade, as long as you’re living with death, I can’t ever be convinced that you’re really _living_. I’ll never be convinced you’re all right. Think about that.” Then Adam sighed deeply, struggled out of Jade’s sweatshirt, and strode meaningfully to the door. He lingered there for a moment, eyes dancing over Davey’s sometimes-there back. “I guess I’ll see both of you later,” was what he ended on, and then the door slammed behind him. 

~*~

“He’s right,” Davey said very seriously once Adam left, lifting his head and looking critically at Jade. “I can’t give you what you need.” His face was paler than usual, and shimmering, pearly ghost-tears made his eyes look wet. He blinked, and one slid down his nose and should have dropped on the counter, but instead it vanished once it left his not-body. 

Jade sighed deeply, a terrible sinking feeling making his solar plexus heavy and sore. He slowly walked up to the counter, letting it press against his abdomen as he rested his elbows on it where Davey’s tears should have fallen. “He’s _not_ right. He just doesn’t understand, because this is not the way he would be happy. He can’t imagine that I might be different, he never has been able to.”

Davey stayed silent, though Jade could hear him swallowing roughly, determinedly. 

“Hey, look at me,” he said gently. 

Davey kept his eyes fixed downward, and slowly shook his head. “But _I_ want the best for you, too. I get what he’s saying. And you can’t...Jade you _can’t_ stay in this three room apartment for the rest of your life. You can’t lie to every person you meet about your boyfriend. You can’t exist without _touch_.” Davey opened his hands, stared at his palms and the many delicate lines through them like they were something infernal. 

The space between their bodies or not-bodies stretched on like a desert, like a grave. Endless and barren. Jade stood there for a long time thinking, his brows knit and lip between his teeth. “You know, I just don’t believe that,” he said eventually, walking to the other side of the counter to where Davey was sitting, wavering and holographic. “I keep telling myself it should matter, that nothing is more important that getting healthy, self improving. But...I just don’t feel it. I’ve never been in love before, but all that crap about how once you’re in love, it’s all you care about? That’s how I feel. Nothing seems more important than you, and being with you. Even if it means never touching you.” _Or dying_ , Jade thought, but did not say. 

Davey looked up at him, eyes still huge and damp and moved. “You say that now. But what happens a week from now? Months from now? All that matters to me is being with you, too, Jade but I’m a ghost. I have nothing to lose, I have _nothing_. You have a whole life to live that loving me will be keeping you from.” 

Jade suddenly made two fists in the front of his sweatshirt, _tired_ of hearing other people tell him what _living_ was. Wasn’t loving living? If loving prevented living but love was your life, did one negate the other? Wasn’t it _his fucking life_ anyway, his life to choose to live or choose to end or choose to spend with a ghost if he _wanted to_? “Fuck, Davey! You have _no idea_ what I was like before this. What a mess I was. _That_ was existing inside an apartment, _that_ wasn’t a life. I hadn’t _felt_ until I met you!” 

Davey stood up too then, so violently that the stool would have been upended were he more than ectoplasm. He sparked with electricity, the whole of him crackling and making Jade’s hair stand on end, his clothes cling to him with static humming. “Jade, what if you could feel that with someone else, someone al--”

“I don’t _want_ someone else,” Jade said desperately suddenly reaching out and and cupping the contour of Davey’s jaw with his hand, the pain singing through him like poison. Davey smacked his hand away, leaving another dry-ice burn on Jade’s forearm from the contact. 

“Don’t do that! Why do you do that?! Why do you hurt yourself?” Davey was crying openly now, crystalline trails streaking his cheeks and buzzing in the corners of his eyes like they were alive.

“See this?” Jade said furiously, holding up his blistered palm. “You see this?I didn’t feel this before I met you. I didn’t feel pain, I didn’t feel _anything._ ” 

_“I can’t do anything but hurt you,_ ” Davey explained, his own hand pressed longingly to the place Jade’s hand just occupied, fingers trembling.

Jade stared, his fist closing around broken skin and his heart thundering hard in his chest. “And _I_ think that even being hurt is better than not feeling anything at all,” he spat out. 

Davey swayed back and forth for a second, visibly contemplating whether or not he could hold himself back, before something broke down inside of him and he was upon Jade, arms thrown around his neck and lips at his pulse, and it was excruciating but still, Jade held on. Fingers clutching the searing chill of ghost fabric and blood freezing to a near stop under ice lips, still, Jade held on.


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter 10

The next morning, Adam asked to meet him at a cafe, probably because it was neutral territory. On the walk Jade thought about a lot of things, his hands shoved wrist deep in the front pockets of his jacket as he contemplated how strange it felt to be _in a fight,_ with Adam. He wasn’t even sure that _fight_ was an appropriate word for whatever this was, because it wasn’t conflict, it wasn’t something that could be resolved, because it was based in misunderstanding. Adam simply could not understand him, nor could he understand what he was going through, or the choice he made. Was going to make. Adam loved differently than Jade, and love wasn’t an experience you could try on like a scarf, it wasn’t something you could sample like food. If you didn’t understand, you had to trust. 

Eventually Jade shucked his jacket, because he was beginning to sweat underneath it. Like fighting with Adam, being too-warm was an alien sensation. He always felt like he was chasing warmth, as if it was this thing ever elusive, escaping from his cold fists. Being too-warm felt wrong somehow; it reminded him of the space expanding between he and Davey the farther he walked away from his apartment. Then again, everything reminded him of Davey. Every beautiful thing he saw he instantly perceived in stark clarity before mentally cataloguing it, attempting to retain all of its depth and detail so he could explain it later. 

Every cute dog, awkward and gangly and still a puppy tugging its own leash and tripping over its paws. Every piece of street art that was more than graffiti, twisted edges and colors laid close and clinging to urban surfaces. Every clever sign. Every happy couple. Every cloud huge and white and immense once the fog burnt off. The smell of the salt, the roses in the flower boxes outside of that Mexican restaurant that gave out free tamale samples on Fridays. 

When Jade made it to the coffee shop Adam was sitting in front of with his legs crossed, he had a whole book full of beautiful things in his head, things he wouldn’t have noticed before he knew Davey. Things he wouldn’t have seen as ugly or beautiful, things that would have been invisible. He sat down abruptly in the chair across from Adam, one of those ornate, wobbly metal things. He liked the filigree in its legs, and he liked the mirror and colored glass imbedded in the table top, so in they went to his list of things to tell Davey. 

“I like this table,” he blurted once he was seated. 

Adam surveyed him for a moment, strong hand tightening on his mug steaming with latte. Then he shook his head. “You really are a different person, Jade,” he finally responded, sighing. His gaze was unreadable, blue eyes twinkly like they knew something. 

“Sorry?” Jade said, unsure. “What do you mean?” 

Adam shook his head, then pulled a five out of his wallet, which he dropped on Jade’s side of the mirrored table. “Go order, then we’ll talk about it. By the way, I wanted to meet with you to apologize, not to lecture you. So you can relax.” 

A few minutes later Jade came back with a croissant and a mug of house blend, still cautious despite Adam’s assurance. “Share this with me?” He asked, tearing the croissant in half and handing the bigger half to Adam like a peace offering. Adam took it and tore off a bite inelegantly. Because Adam wasn’t one to bullshit, he dove right in.

“I’m really sorry I stormed out yesterday,” he said through a mouthful of pastry. “That was not cool of me. I wasn’t trying to be an asshole, though, and I wasn’t trying to tell you how to live your life...you gotta understand, Jade, I’ve known you a long time. And when you know a crazy person for a long time, you don’t always believe them right off the bat when they’re trying to tell you what’s healthy for them.” He gazed critically at Jade across the table, one of his hands gesticulating with croissant. 

Jade nodded, sipping his coffee and following along. He knew exactly what Adam meant, because there had been plenty of times in his past when he’d lied in various ways to evade the smothering care and worry of concerned friends. When he was depressed, he had just wanted to be left alone to die, to wither and sleep and hurt himself in every way he knew how. He wanted to spiral, but Adam always knew better, and saw through his ploys for abandonment, excuses like _I need to be left alone for a few weeks to write_. “I don’t know how to convince you that this time, it isn’t like that,” Jade admitted, realizing how he must look. 

Adam shook his head violently, “You don’t have to convince me. I can tell.” 

Jade was taken aback for a moment by Adam’s certainty. Then he regained his footing, choosing words with prudence. “I...You know how few people I’m attracted to. How rarely I _want_ anyone. Adam... _I want him_. With everything that I am. And it’s not _because_ I can’t have him. It’s _in spite of that_.” He inhaled sharply then, realizing that this was the first time he’d uttered those stinging, terrible words. _I can’t have him_. He took a sip of coffee, which was hot enough to burn his tongue were it to linger there for long. 

“It did cross my mind, that you were choosing something unattainable so that you didn’t have to face real love or something. Like...god, I can’t believe I’m even saying this, but you choosing a _ghost_ ,” he whispered the word like it was dirty, “ was easier than manning up and actually going out on a date with a real, alive dude.”

“I was worried that you’d think that,” Jade mumbled. 

“But last night, on the drive back ton Sausolito, I kept on thinking about it. And thinking about what it was that didn’t sit right with me about how I’d acted...and it hit me. It was Davey.” 

“What about him,” Jade said carefully, doing all he could to keep any traces of defensiveness from tainting his words. 

“I liked him,” Adam shrugged. “I mean, my first impression was kind of muddled by the fact that he was a ghost and all...that’s a lot to swallow, dude...but, aside from that, when I thought back on it, he just seemed really cool. And he reminded me of you, but not in a clone way, in a complimentary way,” Adam explained, pausing a moment to demolish the rest of his croissant half. 

Jade watched him, thinking how very lucky he was to have a friend like Adam. He briefly wondered how long it would take most people to recover from the shock of stumbling into their friend’s haunted flat, let alone how long it would take them to even _consider_ the source of that haunting as their friend’s romantic partner. “Thank you,” he said, grinning crookedly, amazed.

“No, no it’s true,” Adam assured him. “Anyway, the more I thought about it, the more I realized... _he’s perfect for you_. You have this weird love/sex/dating thing anyway, your asexuality or whatever, so who’d be a better match for you than this Davey guy?” 

Jade rolled his eyes the way he always did when Adam brought up his asexuality, because try as Adam might, he would never get it. He clearly didn’t get that if Davey was alive, and he did have a body, Jade would be so willing to fuck and be fucked by that body that categorizing his sexuality would be pointless and irrelevant. Still, he admired that Adam was trying. And in the end, Davey wasn’t just some person. He was _dead,_ and Adam seemed to be dealing with that part brilliantly. 

“Adam, you’re wonderful,” Jade started after a deep breath, reaching across the table and laying his hand on Adam’s. He cringed, because it was his bad hand, and one he’d all but destroyed the surface of yesterday recklessly touching Davey’s jawline. “But this has nothing to do with my sexuality. Davey would be perfect for me regardless of whether or not he was dead, or I could touch him or hold him or anything, just because he’s perfect for me. He just is. Because I love him.” 

Adam sighed deeply, flipping Jade’s hand over on the table and peering at the blisters, a parade of unreadable emotions flickering across his face, a parade that eventually ended in a very clear grimace of sympathy pain. “You know, I’ve waited to hear you say that for a long time. Really, in all the time I’ve known you Jaderade, I’ve just wanted you to be a happy guy. To be in love. And I really believe that you’re in love with him. And the part of me that wishes you were in love with someone...well, alive...that part of me isn’t selfish. It just wants the best for you.” 

“But the best for you might not be the best for me,” Jade said slowly, closing his fingers gingerly to conceal the lymphy pink skin of his palm. He thought about wrapping it this morning, but something about the pain was wonderful, something about it kept him rooted to the deeper, more aching pain inside of his solar plexus that was the pain of loving Davey. He didn’t want to disinfect that pain, he didn’t want it to heal. It made him real. 

Adam shook his head. “I thought about that, too. I thought that maybe it was just me not understanding or something, or imposing my own standards of a relationship onto you...but it’s not just that. You said it yourself. You don’t love him because you can’t touch him, you love him in spite of that.” His eyes were huge and ernest, and Jade squirmed underneath the gaze, knowing where this conversation was leading because he’d gone there many times before, lying awake in a cold room longing so desperately for Davey’s body to fit against his without the barrier of ice and pain.

“Yes,” Jade said unevenly, waiting for it. 

“I know why your hand is like that. I know what it does to you, to touch him. And I only wish something different for you because that...that’s gonna kill you Jade. And if it doesn’t kill you figuratively, it will kill you literally.” 

They stared at each other for a moment, coffee going slowly cool on either side of them. Jade’s heart was thudding in his chest, reminding him with every beat that he was alive, alive, alive. Alive, and this pain was inescapable. He swallowed thickly, a far away prickling behind his eyelids warning him that if they went too deeply into this, he would cry, and that would be another unfamiliar feeling to withstand this morning, and he didn’t know if he could endure anymore. “Well,” he said, voice miraculously not cracking, “What the fuck do I do about it?” 

Adam rubbed his chin with his knuckles, finally grabbing his forgotten coffee and downing the rest of the mug. “I don’t know what to tell you, Jade.” There was a long moment where he didn’t look up, eyes instead thoughtfully trained on the multicolored glass and mirrors in the tabletop. Jade looked down too, eyes met with several other miniature Jade’s staring back at him with wet brown eyes and a creased brow. So they sat, regarding and being regarded by their many reflections. 

“I guess...” Adam stopped, laughing a weird laugh and reaching across the table to grip Jade’s torn hand with both of his own. He held him fiercely there for a moment, and said, “I trust that whatever you choose to do, it will be the right thing for you. And I respect you for that.” 

Jade closed his eyes, and in spite of himself two tears escaped, sliding down his face and collecting in the corners of his mouth. He squeezed Adam back, even though his hand stung with Davey. “Thank you. Thank you,” was all he could say in return, the ache in his chest abating minimally, like a loosening knot, greased into submission by all the beautiful things he had seen for the first time and Adam’s wrist bone digging into his bleeding palm. 

“Hey, you’re my friend,” Adam said, letting go of Jade and immediately transforming back into his usual, nonchalant self. He slouched in the metal chair, lazy grin coming back smooth and familiar to his face. “I even bought you coffee.” 

~*~

“That was weird,” Jade announced once he was through the door, again encased in the safe, familiar, cradling, sensation of cold. He felt something swish across the apartment, so when he turned around after fiddling with the deadbolt, Davey was there before him. 

“What was weird?” He asked, putting his mirage-palms on either side of Jade on the doorframe, bracing himself there and leaning his body in as close as he could without doing any damage to Jade’s body, which shuddered with frostbite. His voice was low with too many unrealized things, desire and longing and sadness and joy, all of which were sick with disbelief, with awe.

Instinctually, Jade’s own palms wanted to press against Davey’s shirt, fist into the shimmering white not-there fabric and draw him close enough to feel the not-there pulse skitter under his lips, the not-there warmth rake through him like fingers through loose earth. Of course, the knowledge and memory of pain stopped him, and he thought of Adam’s reminder _if it doesn’t kill you figuratively..._

Jade cleared his throat and he murmured “If you slipped, or if your solidity fractured for a second and you fell through the door frame right now, you’d sweep through me. It would probably...” 

Davey stood upright abruptly, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Oops,” He whispered, cheeks coloring in a lovely ghost-mauve. 

“No, not oops,” Jade sighed, already missing the threat of death hanging over him like lips unfelt and unkissed. “But maybe not yet.” For the briefest of seconds, he let the back of his hand graze the nearest strand of Davey’s hair, which was curling down over his shoulder and sticking out awry from the rest. It was very cold, too cold to touch, but when he pulled his hand back to his body there was only a very thin red line, and his skin had not been broken. It didn’t feel like enough, but he refrained from taking more. 

“So, what was weird?” Davey asked again, sitting down at the counter and pulling his knees up to his chin. “I missed you, by the way. Sometimes, when you’re not here, I just disappear.” 

Jade’s eyes widened. “That’ not good.” 

“It’s okay,” Davey shrugged, pointing at the stool across from him and motioning for Jade to come sit at it. “I come back when you’re here. And I don’t mind disappearing if it passes the time more quickly.” He tucked the strand of hair that burnt Jade behind his ear, and smiled distantly.

“Well maybe I just shouldn’t leave for very long,” Jade said, Adam’s voice again echoing in his head. _If it doesn’t kill you figuratively.._.

“Jade. I’m dying to know what was weird. And what Adam said, and how that whole thing went,” Davey stretched his arms out across the counter like an impatient little kid, covering the surface with himself and his want. 

Jade admired the ropes of sinew and muscle moving in those arms for a moment before saying, “That’s what was weird. How Adam reacted...I don’t know, he had a very fast turnaround. I’m not even sure how to explain it.” 

“So it went well?” Davey asked, head perking up off the counter. “I’m glad we have his permission to marry and whatnot. This was beginning to feel very old-fashioned.” 

Jade snorted, not exactly sure what he had Adam’s permission to do. Not that he needed permission. It was just strange to have a party outside his existence with Davey to understand at least in theory what he was considering as a possible solution to this uncertain future, and to accept it. In theory. He inhaled raggedly, stretching his own arm out across the counter and holding his palm open and fingers outstretched, like he were beckoning Davey to place his hand inside. “It went shockingly well. I think...I think it comes from Adam knowing me. Really knowing me, when I was depressed and when I was unhealthy. He knows what I’m like when I’m in danger of doing stupid shit, and he knows how radically different this is. I am.” 

Davey nodded, fingers creeping closed to Jade’s on the counter, “Before he thought I was making you sicker, right?” 

“I’m not sure,” Jade admitted, knowing it was a number of things Adam thought. That he couldn’t take care of his own problems and own mental illness, that he didn’t know what was best for him, that loving a dead man was no different than wanting to kill himself. He paused for a moment, thinking very deeply. “Maybe he’s right. About whatever he thought. But the important difference, and _what’s weird_ is that he _gets_ how I love you. He doesn’t question that, he’s not trying to convince me otherwise.” 

“Because he knows it’s the truth,” Davey said quietly. 

They regarded each other for a moment, a tiny smile creeping onto their lips until it was shared. “I guess so. I mean, he still seems worried. But not skeptical.” 

“Worried about what?” 

Jade took a deep breath, mind clouded by the terrifying, absolving image of Davey’s body falling through his. He counted to five slowly to realign himself, to order his words into something he could say without it seeming fatalistic, although making it seem less fatal was turning it into a lie. He settled on: “He’s worried about the same things you’re worried about. Me, and how loving you is going to affect the life I live,” he said carefully. Davey nodded but didn’t say anything, and Jade studied his face, the sharp lines and angles and thoughtful, dark eyes. He knew that at some point soon, he was going to have to tell Davey that he _didn’t_ want to live like this. He wanted to die like this, certainly, but not to live. He couldn’t live like this. He could stand being in his apartment for the rest of his life, he could stand the world’s sudden beauty, the world’s sudden ugliness, he could stand isolation from everything around him if it meant he got to have Davey. But only if he got to have _all of Davey_. And that meant the edge of his hip-bone pressed into the flesh of his hands, it meant his clavicle white and elegant and under his lips. It meant being inside of Davey, and feeling Davey inside of him. It meant everything. 

“How is loving me going to affect the life you live?” Davey finally asked like he knew the answer but needed to hear it outside his head, his image shuddering with the sudden overwhelm tainting the equilibrium of the room. Jade had to stop himself from smoothing out the new folds and flickers in Davey’s body, which vanished soon after they appeared. 

“Loving you _is_ the life I want to live,” is what Jade answered after some consideration, because more than anything else he could have said, it was true. 

They sat together for another few moments of aching silence, which were full of Jade’s breaths and heartbeats, and the idea and memory of Davey’s. 

“Dave,” Jade asked, tilting his head and dropping his gaze. “...Where do you think we go when we die?” 

Davey scoffed, flipping his hair from his shoulder in a motion that felt like cold wind. “Seriously?” He stood up, flickering and shifting his image to stand behind Jade, hand hovering just above his shoulder, lips just beside his ear, eyes fixed on the wall opposite them like it was an answer. “I think we get stuck in our apartments until someone comes along and finds us. That’s been my experience, anyway.” 

“But your experience is unusual. I don’t think most people stick around,” Jade said, turning on his stool to face Davey. 

“Are you asking me about heaven?” Davey raised an eyebrow. “Because I know nothing.” 

“No, I’m just thinking,” Jade sighed, tilting forward less than a millimeter towards Davey, teeth gritted together in longing and chill. “I don’t think we really know where we go. That’s my point, is that we don’t _know._ So...what if we _don’t_ just end. I mean, we _can’t_ just end. You didn’t. You’re proof that we don’t just rot in the ground, which is what I thought happened before this.” 

Davey was quiet aside from the high-pitched radio static hum that increased in volume when he was thinking or feeling very strongly. “So if not everyone is a ghost, and we don’t just die, but you’re not talking about heaven, do you have an _idea_ in mind?” He asked.

Jade stopped himself before he said anything, because he realized that he didn’t have an idea in mind. Or, he had a handful of half-ideas and questions and wonderings, but no actual _answer_. He also knew nothing, nothing of heaven and nothing of afterlives and until recently, nothing of ghosts. It was a huge question mark lingering hazily on the horizon of a future he’d never thought much about, because in the past he he didn’t _care_ what happened to him after he died. He only knew that death was an alternative to life, and at that time he only wanted an alternative. Hopefully a finite one. Only now did he know that death was apparently _not_ a finite alternative to life. It was _something else_. Something different. Something unlike heaven but perhaps better than this purgatory. 

And the world was broken,and imperfect and ugly, but now that he had Davey he was making lists of beautiful things. He saw everything differently, he saw things in technicolor rather than black and white, he saw things in their many dimensions and sides all hacked up and reformed like a cubist landscape. Davey changed everything, he changed Jade’s perception of the world, he changed _life_. So it was very easy to imagine, and then to more than imagine and know, that he could change death, too. 

“Dave, what if we could touch?” Jade breathed, turning around to fix his eyes on Davey’s, both sets dark and full of pupil from all the things they were not yet saying. 

Davey bit his lip, looking down and blinking. “Why? It doesn’t matter because we can’t.” 

“But _what if we could_? We can’t _here_ , we can’t if you’re dead and I’m _alive_ , but--”

“I knew you were going there. I knew you were going to say that,” Davey said quickly, reaching up and pushing his fingers into your hair, taking a step away from Jade to keep his elbows from hurting him. “And I’ve been wondering how to respond, because I know the right answer is to tell you no. I know that I should talk you out of it and urge you otherwise, and tell you that I love you too much to see you die like me, because that’s what love is supposed to be about. Sacrifice, and selflessness. But...” Davey’s voice choked out, quitting in his throat when he looked at Jade’s eyes, where he could see his own reflection shimmering and unreal, the way he was always. 

“But what?” Jade whispered, standing up abruptly and facing Davey, so close it hurt. 

“But I’m not selfless. I’m so _selfish_. I want you to try everything, selfishly, _I want you_ to die if it means there’s even a _possibility_ you could be with me the way I want you. I’m sorry, I just-”

“Don’t be sorry,” Jade said firmly, his breath dusting across Davey and making ripples in him. “You’re not being selfish, we both are. Suicide is selfish, it always is, but _so is love_. You shouldn’t want me to live if you love me, _because I wouldn’t be happy._ We want the same thing. We’re in love, this is what you do when you’re in love.” His words were fast and frantic, and Davey followed them rapid-fire, his eyes darting back and forth over Jade’s lips and own mouth slightly parted in the familiar cocktail of desire and longing and sadness and joy and of course, disbelief. Awe. 

“We don’t know what will happen,” Davey said, uncertain even though he is certain. 

“We know it’s not finite,” Jade assured him. 

“For _me,_ it wasn’t, but what if it is for you? What if you just die and leave me behind, and I’ll just stay in this apartment?!”

Jade shook his head, carding a hand through his hair, startled by how hard his heart was beating. “I wouldn’t, I couldn’t. Just die, I mean. Dave...why did you stay. Do you know?” 

Davey chewed on his lip for another moment before saying, “I’m not sure. I have theories...” he smiled, shaking his head as his cheeks darkened into the singular color of a ghost flushing. “I keep reading stuff on the internet, ghost lore and legends. Everything says that hauntings are usually the result of unfinished business....like to avenge a murder or tell a secret or pine for a lost love or something. And then they fade away once the business is finished, or after so many years have passed nothing matters anymore. And at first, that seemed like it didn’t fit for me...I didn’t have any unfinished business. I fucking committed suicide, I didn’t leave anyone or anything behind...but then I realized, it was you.” 

“I thought so,” Jade said, moved by all the things he was feeling, all the burns on his hands and the longing in his chest. “I thought it was me.” 

“It was you. It has to be...I think my unfinished business was finding you. And I did.”

“So now, you’re ready to...whatever most people do when they die.” Everything was fitting together, every piece of the puzzle Jade had of his half-ideas and questions and wonderings was slowly assembling. Jade was alive, so of course Davey was still a ghost. He probably would stay here as long as Jade did, tending to his unfinished business. He would stay here _until Jade died_ , and only then would things change. 

“I don’t know if I’ll stay here as a ghost with you, or if we’ll both move on together, but we won’t be apart. I’m sure of it. It doesn’t make sense otherwise,” Jade said, voice a raspy, amazed piece of shock just barely above a whisper. 

“If we’re both ghosts, no one will see us. I don’t think other people can see me, unless they’re connected to you, like Adam. It’s weird, I can feel that it’s not him who saw me. It was you wanting him to, so he did. But if you’re not here connecting me to the real world...I don’t think I can be a part of it. We’ll be together, but alone.” 

“Then we won’t be alone. I’m okay with it if you are. That’s how I feel already, that’s how it is already. For both of us,” Jade said. 

Davey’s eyes flickered, his body humming and whirring desperately. “I love you,” he said, clasping his palms together in front of him to prevent anything from happening. “I love you so fucking much.” 

Jade nodded fiercely, placing his own palm open on his chest, stunned by the steady expansion and deflation of his lungs. “I know. I know.” Then, suddenly, “I want to do this.” 

“I want you to,” Davey said slowly. “And I’m not sorry.” 

“That’s why I love you.” 

They looked at each other for a long time, and Jade counted the beats of his frantic, terrified heart.


End file.
